A borderless roll-up that buys, builds and grows digital businesses - and hands the founders equity instead of a fund's fine print.
Napkin Inc. - the holding company that turned a phrase, "buy, build & grow," into a cap table spanning five countries.
Most acquirers make sellers sign away the upside. Napkin Inc. was built to do close to the opposite. Founded in February 2021 and run by co-founder and chief executive Matthew Liberto, the company buys cash-flowing digital service providers - creative and advertising agencies, SaaS shops, fintechs, e-commerce services - and folds them into a shared structure where acquired founders and staff receive common stock rather than watching preferred shareholders sit ahead of them. Napkin describes itself plainly: it "buys, builds & grows elite digital service providers and technology companies."
The framing is deliberately unglamorous, and that is part of the point. Napkin is not chasing a single moonshot. It is assembling a network of profitable small businesses and trying to make the whole worth more than the sum of its parts. The company even bought its aspirational stock ticker as a web address - NPKN.com - years before it would ever need one, a small act of naming its ambition out loud.
Figures compiled from Napkin's public materials, Crunchbase and The Org. "500+" reflects Napkin's own description of its extended network; its core team is roughly 30 people. Revenue and funding specifics are largely undisclosed.
"Not a typical PE fund - no LPs, sharing equity with staff and acquired founders."
Napkin's customers are, in a sense, its future colleagues. It courts what it calls "digital disrupters" - advertising and creative agencies, SaaS and tech founders, payment solutions, fintechs, development houses, video producers, social-media managers, influencer and PR firms, copywriters, and e-commerce service providers. These are exactly the kinds of businesses that are profitable but often too small to attract traditional private equity, and whose founders may not want a clean exit so much as a bigger platform.
The problem Napkin sets out to solve is the loneliness and friction of that middle ground. Selling a healthy agency usually means either handing it to a strategic buyer who absorbs it, or grinding through a bespoke deal one at a time. Napkin's answer is to batch the process: it gathers applications from multiple companies, runs diligence together, and acquires several at once - turning a slow, isolating transaction into something closer to a cohort. Sellers receive common stock at a single set price, aligning them with everyone else under the same roof.
Digital businesses apply; Napkin groups promising candidates and runs diligence together rather than one by one.
Napkin raises debt and equity capital and issues common shares to sellers and staff - no LPs, no preferred stack.
Portfolio companies scale under one structure, aiming to turn recurring revenue into investable, tradable royalty streams.
On top of this sits Napkin Deals, an online marketplace the company brands "where deals meet capital." It connects buyers, sellers and capital providers across M&A, capital raises, debt financing, real estate, joint ventures and crypto/digital-asset transactions, pairing AI-powered deal matching with human review and earning commission-based advisory fees on closings.
The bet is that alignment beats fine print. Whether or not the royalty-stream vision ever reaches a public ticker, the structural choice - common equity, shared upside, a network rather than a silo - is what separates Napkin from both classic private equity and the wave of SaaS and agency aggregators it competes with.
Napkin's core engine: acquiring profitable digital businesses in batches and scaling them under one shared, revenue-sharing cap table.
"Where deals meet capital" - an online venue for M&A, financing, real estate, joint ventures and digital-asset transactions with AI-assisted matching.
An unlimited-design creative provider for e-commerce brands. The deal pushed Napkin past eight-figure annual revenue.
A performance-marketing and analytics agency focused on reporting and conversion-rate optimization - added measurable-results firepower to the portfolio.
Napkin's geography reads like a deliberate division of labor: founded in Miami, incorporated through the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), with teams and companies across the United States, Canada, Latin America, India and Europe. Money, legal charter and talent each sit where they make the most sense rather than where a single map would put them. Liberto's own background - spanning entertainment production, a venture fund, and fintech and crypto executive education - mirrors the company's mash-up of marketers, developers, technologists and finance people.
In the market, Napkin occupies the space between three worlds: the private-equity and search-fund buyers that usually work above its deal size, the SaaS and agency aggregators rolling up digital businesses, and the online marketplaces - the Flippas and Acquire.coms - where small companies change hands. Its differentiator across all three is the same: a founder-friendly, common-equity structure and a batched, cohort-based way of doing deals.
Matthew Liberto co-founds Napkin to buy, build and grow digital service providers under a shared-equity model.
Napkin acquires the unlimited-design agency and crosses eight figures in annual revenue.
The performance-marketing and analytics agency is added, deepening Napkin's measurable-results capabilities.
Napkin raises a Series A round as part of roughly $3.99M in total reported funding.
Incorporation via Abu Dhabi's ADGM and the launch of the "where deals meet capital" marketplace across 50+ countries.
Napkin bought NPKN.com - the stock ticker it hopes to one day trade under - and uses it as its address today.
Before Napkin, Liberto ran live-concert and festival producer Embrace Entertainment and founded the Kingdom Venture Capital Fund.
Napkin gathers applications and runs diligence together, then acquires several companies at once at a single set price.
It buys, builds and grows cash-flowing digital businesses - creative agencies, SaaS, fintech and e-commerce services - and operates Napkin Deals, an online marketplace connecting buyers, sellers and capital providers.
Matthew Liberto co-founded Napkin and serves as CEO; the leadership team also includes a Chief Partnerships Officer and a CFO.
Napkin says it has no LPs and no preferred shares. It raises debt and equity capital and gives acquired founders and staff common stock at a single set price, sharing the upside.
It was founded in Miami, Florida and is incorporated through the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), with teams across North America, Latin America, India, Europe and the UAE.
Its portfolio includes No Limit Creatives (2022) and EmberTribe (2023), among other digital service providers.
Sources: Napkin Inc. (npkn.com & napkindeals.com), The Org, Crunchbase, RocketReach and LinkedIn. Funding and revenue figures are partly undisclosed; where exact numbers are unavailable, this profile signals them as approximate. Napkin Deals notes it is a platform and advisory service and is not a registered broker-dealer, investment advisor or FINRA member.