Home / What I Wish I Knew / How should today’s unicorns think about exits?

How should today’s unicorns think about exits?

James Kim, Partner at Qatalyst Partners and head of the Consumer Internet and FinTech practices, has a 25-year history in M&A with a tremendous list of deals to his name. He has successfully brought companies together like Afterpay to Square, Motorola Mobility to Google, Pixar to Disney, Credit Karma to Intuit, HomeAway to Expedia, OpenTable to Priceline, and Wealthfront to UBS, to name just a few. Having been involved in over 50 M&A transactions totaling well over $100 billion in value, James has been a central character in this market. As unicorns and emerging unicorns plot their future, understanding how to evaluate the M&A landscape is essential. Airbase CFO, Aneal Vallurupalli, will interview James to uncover valuable insights for navigating different types of exits and what it takes to prepare for them.

three shapes

About the speakers.

James Kim

James Kim

James Kim, Partner at Qatalyst Partners

James Kim, Partner at Qalatyst Partners and head of the Consumer Internet and Fintech divisions, boasts an impressive M&A track record spanning 25 years. Throughout his career, he has orchestrated over 50 M&A transactions with a cumulative value of over $100B, including Pixar to Disney, Credit Karma to Intuit, OpenTable to Priceline, Afterpay to Square, Motorola Mobility to Google, and Fitbit to Google. James has been with Qalatyst since 2008. Prior to his current position, he was in the Mergers and Acquisitions Group at Credit Suisse. He has also held roles at Advanced Technology Ventures and Morgan Stanley. James holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Stanford.

Aneal Vallurupalli

Aneal Vallurupalli

CFO at Airbase

Aneal Vallurupalli is the Chief Financial Officer at Airbase. His background includes early- to late-stage corporate finance, corporate development, operations, and tech M&A. Most recently, Aneal was the Vice President of Finance & Operations at Mattermost, where he still serves as an advisor. At Mattermost, Aneal grew the company’s enterprise value, with a 4x increase in revenue growth and by leading the $50M Series B. He also managed the company’s fully distributed global growth by doubling the number of countries it operates in, and growing employee count by 5x. Prior to that, he was the Head of Strategic Finance at Mapbox, where he led the company’s $164M Series C round of funding from SoftBank, and was the founding member of the Corporate Development team at Guidewire (NYSE:GWRE), helping it to grow from a $800M private company to a $7B public company. His career began in technology investment banking at Union Square Advisors, completing a range of public and private M&A transactions, including buy-side, sell-side, corporate divestitures, and restructurings.

Learn how the leading Spend Management Platform can help your company scale.

lines with ball