The Rollup of Tomorrow Vol. 5. Hawk Infinity: 30x value growth in 5 years - in a “crowded” sector

Disclaimer: Unless noted otherwise, views and analysis expressed here are the author's own and based on public sources. The article is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. This is not financial advice. Please consult a professional for investment decisions.

*********************

I hustle for a living. Naturally, I get hyped up about a lot of things on a daily basis. But every now and then, I stumble upon stories that literally take my breath away. Back in April, I covered Hawk Infinity: a Norwegian compounder with a software centric portfolio. 

Further reading: Hawk Infinity: the world’s fastest-growing HoldCo you have never heard of

Having checked in on Hawk over the summer, I was stunned to discover that it had grown by 50%...in 5 months. From $100M to $150M+ EBITDA!   

With my curiosity through the roof, I rang up Joakim Karlsen - a partner at Hawk Infinity and the CEO of Hawk Infinity Software, to find out what’s going on. Joakim comes across as the archetypal Norwegian: congenial, competent, and understated. Until recently, Joakim and his employer had been flying under the radar, with their rapid-fire software M&A strategy largely confined to Northern Europe. This is about to change as Hawk is stepping on the gas, with multiple acquisitions ongoing across Eastern, Western and Southern Europe. 

Is Hawk the “new Visma” - a fellow Norwegian software HoldCo reported to be readying a blockbuster IPO? According to my research, yes and no.

For one, Hawk is growing much faster than Visma. It took Hawk 5 years to get to $150M in run-rate EBITDA, a feat which Visma accomplished over 8+ years, fuelled by PE money (Hg, KKR, Cinven). Hawk’s like-for-like revenue growth rate is almost 3x Visma’s (Q1 2025 data: 29% YoY vs. 11%).  

Further reading: What can we glean from Visma's €4B M&A spree?

In the interview, we covered:

1. Joakim’s career path from investment banking to running Europe’s fastest growing software HoldCo

2. Lessons from growing Hawk from €35M to €1.1B Net Asset Value

3. The ingredients of an AI-proof portfolio

4. Hawk’s North Star metric for evaluating company performance 

5. Hawk is a sternly founder-friendly, hands-off owner. What happens when portfolio companies underperform? 

The Rollup of Tomorrow series is sponsored by Sourcescrub: the No.1 deal sourcing tool for serial acquirers. Now even stronger after their merger with Grata and Datasite!

If you'd rather listen to the audio version of the interview, check out our Rollup Stories podcast on Spotify!

Alex: Welcome Joachim! I don't know if you realise but we have a lot in common. We were born two years apart: you were born in ‘87, and I in ‘85. We have both worked in investment banking. Today, you are the CEO of a major compounder. And I run this blog… which isn’t too bad! I'm very curious to hear about your career path moving from investment banking to Hawk Infinity when it was just a startup

Joakim: I joined investment banking in 2011, right after my university studies. In total I spent 7 great years in investment banking, covering M&A, ECM and DCM across multiple sectors. 4 of those years were in Pareto Securities and 3 in Arctic Securities, both Norway based investment banks. The work was a lot of fun. Fundamentally, it is project based. You pitch projects. Some you win and some you don't. Of the projects you win, some complete and some don't. It’s a constant roller coaster. So after 6-7 years I began to think that I could learn a lot from working with investments with a longer term view.

I wasn't too keen on joining a conventional private equity fund, because they are usually very large. There are many people involved. It’s a bit bureaucratic. I was looking for something different: smaller, newer, staffed by competent and nice people - in an informal setting. Then, as things happen in life, I came across an old colleague from Pareto, Johan Michelsen. Johan and his wife Marianne had founded Hawk 1.5 years prior. I knew him to be both a sympathetic and a very, very skilled guy. We started talking, one thing led to another, and  eventually I joined Hawk exactly 7 years ago, in the summer of 2018.

At the time, Hawk wasn’t really a compounder. It was a small investment company with a Net Asset Value of approx. €35M. We were managing a diverse portfolio. We had an active trading strategy. We had a few strategic investments. We had a few venture investments too. Crucially, at the time of my joining Hawk was experiencing challenges with one strategic investment. That asset absorbed a lot of my time and effort in the first 2 years.

As an investor, we were not really on anyone's radar at that time. Gradually, we divested the non-core holdings and recycled the capital into more long term investments where we could have larger influence. It wasn't until 2020 that we really started to execute on the current strategy, which is to be a perpetual owner of profitable B2B SaaS and software related businesses. 

In order to do that we had to be creative because the cash flow from the existing portfolio was not sufficient to finance our M&A growth alone. We started using shares in Hawk as currency, allowing us to grow accretively faster, while at the same time building a sense of long-term partnership with the founders we acquire companies from. 

Around the same time, we began to build out the team. At first, it was the 3 of us (Johan, his wife Marianne and myself), Today, the central team is almost 20. 

Alex: It sounds like you jumped ship from banking to this dream job…and for the first 2 years it was anything but a dream job! But eventually, you made it work. I'm curious as to how Hawk allocates capital within the group. When the incremental krona or euro of cash flow comes in, how do you decide on what happens to it? Pay out dividends, buy another VMS business, or something else altogether?

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.