group.one Pays $50M for SocialPilot + Revenue and EBITDA Valuation Multiples

August 1, 2025 by Chris Erwin

RockWater Roundup

M&A analysis of the creator economy to make you a better operator and investor.

Today we discuss group.one’s acquisition of SocialPilot, a social-media management and scheduling SaaS platform. We analyze deal details, strategic rationale, revenue and EBITDA multiples, SaaS valuation benchmarks, and rise in social media tech deals.

Let’s break it down…

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–TARGET: SocialPilot–

Overview

Social-media management and scheduling SaaS for SMBs and agencies
Founded 2014 by Jimit Bagadiya (CEO) & Tejas Mehta (COO)
170+ fully remote employees across India & US
HQ’d in Ahmedabad, India

Company Highlights

$10M+ ARR
30k lifetime customers
13k+ paying brands and agencies on platform
Customers are primarily in US, followed by UK and India
Targets $100M in revenue in next 3-5 years

Business Lines

SaaS subscriptions (Essentials, Standard, Premium, Ultimate)
Performance-tier upsells for large agencies

Capital Markets History

Jul ’25: Acquired by group.one for $50M+

Financials (USD):

NOTE: since SP is a private co, there’s no public record of financial data. Below are 2 sources. Best used as directional estimates, and take with a grain of salt

Per FactSet…
FY 2025F Revenue: $22M, up 36% YoY
FY 2025F EBITDA: NA
FY 2024 Revenue: $16.3M
FY 2024 EBITDA: $1.5M

Per trade reports…
3-5 yr ARR target: $100M
2025 projected ARR: $11.8M (up 15-20% YoY)
Run-rate ARR: $10M

–BUYER: group.one–

Overview

European digital-solutions platform inc hosting, domains, web-build, SaaS, marketing
Headquartered in Malmö, Sweden w/ offices in Europe, US, UAE, and India
Brand portfolio includes one.com, WP Rocket, Rank Math, Webglobe, Hostnet.nl
1500+ global employees with Daniel Hagemeier as CEO
Founded 2002 by Jacob Jensen

Company Highlights

Owns 20+ brands including one.com (hosting), WP Rocket (performance), Rank Math (SEO), Hostnet.nl (Dutch hosting)
group.one has made 10+ acquisitions since 2019, focusing on SaaS, hosting, and digital marketing tools for SMBs
FY 2024 (ended Sep 30) pro-forma revenue €350M+
Manages 4M+ registered domain names
2M+ global SMB customers

Business Lines

Subscription hosting & domains:
Site Optimization to improve website speed and experience
Includes AI Pilot, a generative AI engine that auto-creates post captions, rewrites content, and drafts messages for brands
Compliance & Security to keep sites safe and follow rules
Marketplace of SMB SaaS add-ons:
Email, e-commerce, social media
Booking & Payments for managing customer appointments and transactions
Online Marketing:
SEO and social media management tools
Performance plugins (WP Rocket), SEO (Rank Math)

Financials (in USD):

(per PitchBook. FY ends Sep 30)

FY 2024 Revenue: $352M
FY 2024 EBITDA: $103.1M
FY 2024 EBITDA Margin: 29.3%
FY 2024 EBIT: ($66.7M)
FY 2024 EBIT Margin: -63%

Capital Markets History

Jul ’25: Acquired SocialPilot for $50M+
Jun ’25: Raised $1B via debt refinancing (have $2B total debt)
May ’25: Acquired MiniCRM
Dec ’24: Acquired C4 Webhosting
May ‘24: Acquired Shore, a booking & payments platform
May ‘24: Acquired Webglobe, expanding European presence

–DEAL DETAILS–

Overview

Announced July 10 2025
Purchase price: $50M+ cash
100% buy-out, founders remain on to lead SocialPilot independently

Valuation

NOTE: Reminder that multiples are based on financial estimates from FactSet and trade reports. Take with a grain of salt

FY 2024 revenue: 3.1x
FY 2024 EBITDA: 33.3x
FY 2025F revenue: 2.3x
Run-rate ARR: 5.0x
Projected 2025 ARR: 4.3x

Strategic Rationale

Market Expansion & Cross-Sell: SocialPilot adds social media tools to group.one’s offerings, enabling cross-selling to 2M+ customers. SocialPilot can also offer new services from group.one to its 30k lifetime customers
Geographic Fit: SocialPilot’s customers are based in North America and India, while group.one’s customers are primarily in Europe. Combining the two geographies widens each company’s addressable market, as well as access to in-country resources and teams
Product Synergy: AI Pilot pairs with group.one’s AI site-builder to offer an end-to-end solution that allows customers to create a website, publish, and promote
group.one Grows Aggressively through Acquisitions: With 55+ deals in the past decade, this fits a clear buy-and-build strategy to rapidly grow its SaaS / hosting portfolio and geographic footprint

Post-Deal Operations

SocialPilot continues as stand-alone brand; Ahmedabad hub (SocialPilot’s operation center) becomes group.one’s APAC product center
Founders keep current roles to help with integration to SSO, billing, and shared go-to-market
Integration plans:
SocialPilot widget to be added to one.com dashboard by Q4 2025
Joint SMB bundle pricing by Q1 2026.

–WHAT ELSE I FIND INTERESTING–

A big success story for a 100% bootstrapped business by 2 founders.
SocialPilot’s $50M+ exit is unique in that it’s a social / marketing SaaS company built without any VC backing, yet scaled to a meaningful double digit exit. This is rare for tech-enabled marketing platforms, and a big win for the company’s two founders.
These deal dynamics make me think of Social Snowball, which Dotdigital bought for $35M incl earnout (our deal analysis), which only $430k in seed funding and had a sole founder. This could signal a growing trend for tech-enabled social media / marketing services tools: capital-efficient, founder-led companies winning sizable exits without venture funding.

Deal valuation falls into mid-range of recent SaaS multiples.
For the overall 2024 SaaS software market, valuation multiples were generally in the mid single digits, between 4-7x revenue. In 2025 the market is seeing a slight uptick in valuation multiples. Top-performing SaaS companies are selling at a premium to this range, call it 8-10x+.
A creator co corp dev exec, who looks at a lot of these deals, noted that sub scale social media SaaS companies, who do below $10-20M revenue, typically trade at low to mid single digit ARR multiples. Further, that there’s a lot of structure in those deals including earnouts, equity consideration that vests over time, and holdback payments. From our experience, a lot of the undifferentiated social media SaaS co’s have high customer churn and tough unit economics, which makes growth challenging, and explains why these companies trade at lower valuations relative to the broader SaaS market. Another good reference is publicly traded social media SaaS co Sprout Social, which trades at 2.2x revenue.
At a 5x ARR multiple, this puts group.one’s $50M valuation of Social Pilot in the middle of the expected range, which makes sense considering its smaller $10-20M revenue range but bolstered by good growth, estimated at 15-20% YoY. An upper end outlier is Dotdigital’s recent $35M acquisition of Social Snowball, which incl $15M of earnout (our deal analysis). The deal’s estimated valuation, excluding earnout, was 6.7x LTM revenue and 4x run-rate revenue. The company did report over 200% YoY growth, but at run-rate revenue of $5M, that puts them into the subscale cohort. Our explanation of the deal premium was in our deal analysis…
“The premium signals strong buyer confidence in the combined company’s growth potential and revenue synergies once SS’s capabilities are integrated into the DD platform, and that there’s a meaningful opportunity to cross sell products and services to their respective client rosters, and sign up new clients with the new full services suite.”

Martech consolidation continues, with an increasing pocket of activity for social media, influencer marketing, and social commerce solutions.
Social media planning and scheduling tools are seeing a wave of consolidation after a decade of heavy competition and lookalike features. Once a hot space dominated by Buffer, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social, the category became crowded with newly-funded upstarts, and many of them struggled to differentiate. Now, scale and bundling of martech services, and the rise in social media ad spend, are driving merger activity.
Recent deal highlights include social media management software co Sprout Social’s $140M acquisition of influencer marketing co Tagger Media in Aug 2023, link-in-bio co Linktree’s acquisition of social media scheduler Plann in Aug 2024, and IM and social media management co Later’s acquisition of affiliate platform Mavely in Jan 2025. group.one’s $50M+ acquisition of SocialPilot follows this consolidation trend, where a much larger, diversified digital-solutions business wanted to expand its suite of social media solutions.
The M&A activity highlights a broader trend in that martech platforms are absorbing smaller scale peers, in order to expand and cross-sell different services to their clients. More specifically, a large pocket of deal activity is for social media, influencer marketing, and social commerce capabilities, which we write extensively about on our deal blog.

group.one is an aggressive M&A consolidator of SaaS co’s targeting SMBs, targeting the $250B SMB digital ad spend market.
On top of acquiring social scheduler SocialPilot, other recent acquisitions include:
May 2025: mini CRM tech, further expanding tools for SMB customer management and sales automation.
May 2024: Shore, a booking & payments platform adding online appointments and POS payments to group.one’s offerings.
Dec and May 2024: C4 Webhosting and Webglobe, strengthening foothold in Central and Eastern Europe SaaS and hosting markets
Based on FactSet data, SocialPilot has relatively lower margins (10% EBITDA) than typical mar-tech, which isn’t surprising considering SP’s smaller scale. We expect group.one to get a company-wide profit boost from cross-selling opportunities and cost synergies. And overall, we expect more European co’s, similar to group.one and Dotdigital, to increasingly focus dealmaking on social media / marketing SaaS like scheduling, content creation, and analytics tools, to support the growing digital media needs of their brand and marketer clientele. This is a valuable global market, with global SMB digital ad spend projected to top $214B in 2026.

I’m the founder of RockWater Industries. We do M&A and strategy advisory for creator economy and digital agencies. From buy / sell-side M&A and fundraising, to consumer research and go-to-market planning.

DM me on LinkedIn or email me chris@wearerockwater.com

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group.one Pays $50M for SocialPilot + Revenue and EBITDA Valuation Multiples