Operator-Led Intelligence · Private Equity · SaaS

Truth before you
acquire, scale,
or exit.

We work with private equity firms and the operators inside their portfolios. The job is finding what's hiding in the numbers, before a critical decision turns expensive.

Track Record Active
3
IPOs across SaaS, cloud, and payments
$100M+
ARR scaled across revenue organizations
8–23%
EBITDA distortion typical in PE-backed SaaS portfolios
$12
Enterprise value per $1 of recovered EBITDA at 12×
Where we operate
Private Equity Enterprise SaaS Cloud & Payments M&A Diligence Revenue Operations

The Pattern

Same spreadsheets.
Completely different realities.

The difference was never talent. It was visibility.

For decades, we built and exited SaaS, cloud, and payments businesses. Three IPOs. Hundreds of millions in ARR. Time across the table from boards, founders, investors, operators. Through growth phases, through turnarounds, through the weeks before exit.

That experience taught us one thing most people learn too late.

The numbers on the page and the economics inside the business are often two different stories. Revenue growing. EBITDA looking solid. Management confident. Underneath, costs allocated the wrong way. Margins no one can clearly explain. Data fragmented across systems that were never built to talk to each other.

Other companies had less hype and stronger foundations. Cleaner operations. Better discipline. Better decisions.

The businesses that struggled were not run by bad people. They were run by smart people making consequential decisions on information that was delayed or quietly distorted by the systems producing it.

We built SharedVentures to fix that.

How We Work

Alongside you before the decision,
not after the problem.

SharedVentures is not the advisory firm that shows up, delivers a deck, and disappears. We work alongside investors, operating partners, and CFOs at the moments when getting it wrong is expensive.

01

Strategic Advisory

Operator-grade judgment for high-stakes calls. Growth strategy, go-to-market, revenue operations, pre-raise prep, transaction readiness. The kind of thinking we used to do from the inside, available before you commit.

02

Diligence Support

We pressure-test what management is presenting against what's actually happening inside the business. Revenue quality, cost structure, margin sustainability, operational risk. We find what standard diligence misses.

A SharedVentures Company · Valence

EBITDA is being treated like certainty.
It rarely is.

Across SaaS companies and private equity portfolios, we kept seeing the same expensive problem. EBITDA reported correctly on paper. EBITDA distorted in practice. Cost creep. Bad allocations. Pricing drift. Services revenue masking product weakness. Systems that could not reconcile.

No leadership team sets out to quietly lose millions. It still happens every day.

Valence was built to find those distortions early, put a real dollar figure on them, and put the picture in front of investors and operators before diligence does.

"Valence pairs AI-driven analytics with operator-grade financial review. It finds EBITDA leakage and value left on the table. Fast."

Request Your EBITDA Assessment Visit getvalence.ai
What Valence Finds Live
  • Duplicate cost allocation across entities
  • Missing intercompany eliminations
  • Vendor pricing variance post add-on
  • Operating vs. non-operating misclassification
  • Services revenue masking product weakness
  • ERP fragmentation post-acquisition
  • Allocation methodology inconsistency
  • Definitional EBITDA drift over time

Flat fee assessment

$25,000

If we don't find at least $500K in recoverable EBITDA, you don't pay.

About

Lou Cofini

Founder, SharedVentures & Valence

3
IPOs led across SaaS, cloud, and payments
Decades
At the intersection of revenue, finance, and corporate development
$100M+
ARR scaled across revenue organizations from early traction
Connect on LinkedIn

The Story

Built from the inside out.

I spent decades inside SaaS, cloud, and payments businesses, working revenue, finance, and corporate development. Three IPOs. Complex enterprise deals. Integrated payments strategies. Revenue organizations scaled from early traction to hundreds of millions in ARR.

Most of that time I was in the middle of growth, not observing it from the outside.

That experience shapes how SharedVentures works. We are not consultants theorizing from the outside. We are operators who lived inside the same problems, made the same calls under pressure, and learned to read the numbers behind the numbers.

I usually get the call when growth is slowing or going unpredictable. When a sales engine is broken. When a transaction is on the table. When somebody needs to know what's real before committing more capital.

My focus is simple: get clarity on the economics, pressure-test the plan, make sure the decision still works when reality hits.

SharedVentures came from that experience.

Valence came from seeing the same expensive problem too many times across too many portfolios. So we decided to solve it properly.

Growth matters. Truth compounds faster.

Ready to find out

What are your numbers
actually telling you?

No pitch. No deck. A direct conversation about what you are dealing with and whether we can help.

We read every message. Replies usually come back within a business day.