Dave Graham remembers the cheap offices. There was a building in Stockport he considered particularly ugly, and a stretch of company history he calls the “Kebab shop years”. CMap now has an office in Manchester’s Arkwright House. Graham’s response to the upgrade was to wonder how the business had become respectable, then point out that its earlier accommodation cost rather less. A founder can acquire investors, customers and a better postcode without losing his interest in the rent.
It is a useful introduction to someone whose business concerns the gap between doing good work and running a business that can afford to keep doing it. CMap makes software for professional services firms. Graham founded it, led it as CEO, and in September 2025 handed that job to Jon Stead. He stayed, taking the title Founder & AI Strategy Advisor. The interesting part of the handover is where he chose to put his attention next.
A business behind the work
The firms CMap serves have something awkward in common: the thing they sell depends on people, time and projects. An architect’s drawing is visible. The hours required to deliver it, the availability of the next project team and the effect on the firm’s finances are less picturesque. They still have to be accounted for. The invoice has a stubborn habit of arriving after the work.
Graham’s company works in that less photogenic territory. Its software connects activities including client management, job costing, resourcing, timesheets and project accounting. The practical ambition is to help people understand the business around their work. For a consulting firm or an engineering practice, that means seeing commitments and capacity together, rather than treating each project as an island with its own weather.
An April 2020 integration with Sage Intacct offers a concrete example of his approach. CMap connected its project management system to a separate accounting platform, allowing information such as invoices, expenses and client records to move between them. Graham welcomed the combination of specialist products. Even in the prosaic world of purchase invoices, there is a choice about what to build and what to connect.
Pipeline → People → Projects → Financials
The connected activities CMap helps professional services teams manage.
Before the software business grew up
Graham’s earlier business life included J-Media, an IT managed services company in Wilmslow. His public career record places his ownership there from July 2000 to January 2019. That gives the CMap story a longer business background than an AI job title might suggest. He had already spent years in the business of supplying technology to other businesses.
In early 2019, razorblue acquired J-Media’s IT Managed Services business from CMAP Group for an undisclosed sum. Graham, then identified as CMAP Group’s CEO, spoke about what the change would mean for the technical team and for clients. His stated concerns included career progression, a wider range of services and a buyer whose approach to looking after customers matched the group’s own.
A sale can be described entirely through money and ownership. Graham’s comments put employees and service alongside them. That does not reveal the private negotiations, but it does show what he chose to emphasise publicly. The people doing the work and the people paying for it both needed somewhere sensible to go. The transaction was a change in the business around them, too.
The numbers acquired a passport
By January 2020, CMap was a Wilmslow software company with offices there and in Orlando. It had thousands of users across more than 60 countries. More than $4 billion of live projects were being managed through its system. Those were measures of the work passing through the platform, rather than a valuation of Graham or his company - a distinction worth keeping when numbers grow enough to attract commas.
The business had recorded annual revenue growth of 40% over the preceding four years and employed 50 people. NorthEdge’s investment, completed in December 2019 and announced the following January, was intended to support the growing team and international expansion. These figures belong to that moment. They describe the business that took on backing, rather than a claim that every subsequent year followed the same curve.
NorthEdge backed a founding team with several distinct responsibilities: Graham as CEO, Steve Cable in sales, Judith Graham in people, Dan Arthurs in operations, Gary Thickett in technology and Peter McCormack in finance. The list is a helpful corrective to the solitary founder portrait. A company that sells coordination needs some coordination of its own.
Historical snapshot · January 2020
One acquisition, thousands of working details
In February 2023, CMap acquired Atvero, a document management software business serving architects, engineers and construction firms. Its tools worked with Microsoft SharePoint, Teams and Outlook. CMap’s existing concern with project economics now sat alongside the documents, drawings and correspondence that projects generate. Anyone who has hunted for the right revision of a file will recognise the appeal of a less adventurous filing system.
At the announcement, the two businesses together served nearly 500 customers globally and helped deliver more than 100,000 projects a year. Marcus Roberts, Atvero’s director and co-founder, would lead the business unit within CMap. Each product would retain its own development team and roadmap. Expansion here involved preserving specialist knowledge as well as adding another product to the list.
The integration announced that May made the intention tangible. Projects created in CMap would also be created in Atvero, with associated companies and contacts. Subsequent edits would synchronise between the systems. Graham described the release as “version one”, with further development shaped by customers using both products. It is a modest phrase for an acquisition story, and a useful one: buying the business was followed by the patient work of making information travel properly.
A company designed to outlast a job title
In November 2024, ECI Partners invested in CMap, providing an exit for NorthEdge. The new partnership’s stated plans included further investment in the team and product, deeper involvement in architecture, engineering, construction and consulting, and continued international growth. Graham linked the opportunity to expansion in the UK and US, and to opportunities for CMap employees to grow with the business.
Looking back on NorthEdge’s involvement, he highlighted the team it had helped build, investment in technology and the commercial operation, and support for CMap’s first acquisition. That is a fairly practical account of what an investor had contributed. Capital had company: recruitment, product development and a transaction that extended what CMap could offer.
Ten months after the ECI announcement came the CEO handover. Stead had joined in 2020 and worked across strategy, product, marketing and sales. Graham described him as having helped triple the company’s size. The succession therefore placed someone with experience across the business in charge. Graham’s ambition to build a company lasting decades now included a change in who ran it day to day.
- 2019NorthEdge invests in December
- 2023Atvero joins CMap
- 2024ECI becomes the investment partner
- 2025Stead becomes CEO; Graham focuses on AI
AI has to earn its place in the working day
Graham gave his new role two connected purposes: developing AI capabilities in CMap’s product and encouraging AI adoption inside CMap itself. He was committing his time to a technological change while another leader took responsibility for the wider company. The arrangement made his priorities explicit. The founder would remain involved, with a narrower subject demanding his attention.
In January 2026, CMap introduced CMap intelligence, describing a product direction organised around the functions of a services firm: sales, delivery, operations, finance and administration. It also introduced CMap Chat as a way to access insight through conversation. These are company developments after Graham’s move into the advisory role; they sit within the direction he outlined, without making every feature his personal invention.
The company also set out plans for connections to firms’ own language models through the Model Context Protocol. The underlying proposition was to bring intelligence into existing working processes. For Graham’s story, the continuity is striking: from connecting project and accounting systems to synchronising project records, the business has repeatedly addressed the movement and usefulness of information. AI gives that longstanding concern a new set of tools, and new expectations to meet.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Dave Graham · announcing his new role, September 2025
Still watching the room
Graham’s reflections on a CMap User Forum provide a quieter measure of what he values. He recalled a business that began with a handful of clients and now supported hundreds of firms. What pleased him was seeing customers talk to one another, exchanging experiences across different businesses. Even at a software event, the most satisfying connection could happen between two people.
That observation helps give the corporate milestones a human scale. Investments change what a business can attempt. An acquisition changes its capabilities. A succession changes who decides. Customers still have projects to finish, and employees still have work to make sense of. Graham’s public remarks keep returning to those relationships. His own job has changed, while his interest in the people around the product remains visible.
The better office supplies an apt final detail. Graham can enjoy seeing the business grow and still make a joke about what the old place cost. He has handed over the CEO title while keeping a new piece of work. For a founder interested in building something that lasts, there is plenty left to do after someone else takes the chair.