Polychrome buys the business. Then gets to work.

Ben Rometsch had a problem that looked suspiciously like success. Large organizations wanted Flagsmith, the open source feature management tool he had co-founded. Investors were interested, too. But somebody had to turn that attention into a commercial operation. Rometsch wanted to keep building software. The sales department was another matter.

That is the opening Polychrome looks for: a useful product, evidence of demand, and a founder whose working day cannot stretch any further. The investment firm buys into small and medium B2B software businesses, then supplies people who know how to sell, market, hire and manage the numbers. The founder gains colleagues with an ownership stake.

A buyer with a day job

Polychrome began in 2020 with Matt Althauser, Greg Lazarus and Alex Boswell. Their résumés explain the proposition. Althauser had run revenue and operations at Amplitude. Lazarus had been chief revenue officer at Returnly. Boswell had worked in finance and business operations at Twilio. Selling software, organizing teams and planning growth were familiar work.

Buying companies required a different education. In their 2024 Scaling DevTools interview, the partners describe an early proposed $50 million acquisition that fell apart when the seller learned they had never bought a business. The experience redirected their attention toward smaller developer tools, where their operating skills could carry more weight.

The distinction matters. A founder considering an investor must ask what arrives after the money. In a 2022 Acquire.com interview, Lazarus described joining sales work while his partners handled other commercial functions. He said the team had met with Rometsch every morning for a year and a half. There is a substantial calendar commitment hidden inside the term private equity.

“We’re in the trenches with the founder every day.”

Greg Lazarus / Acquire.com, 2022

Matt Althauser

Alex Boswell

Greg Lazarus

The price includes a piece of the future

Flagsmith’s arrangement made that commitment tangible. As Boswell explained to Axial, Polychrome initially took 25% equity for a cash investment. Another 25% depended on reaching a growth milestone. The eventual partnership was split equally. Part of the buyer’s ownership had to be earned through the business’s progress.

For the founder, the cost includes a meaningful share of future value. That trade requires believing the partnership can build a more valuable company together. It also requires agreement about who makes decisions and what progress means. Milestone equity gives the operating promise a concrete consequence.

Polychrome also buys businesses outright. Checkbox, the survey software company, became a full acquisition in September 2022, according to Boswell’s account. Different founders want different destinations. Someone who wants a commercial partner and someone who wants to leave the business need different arrangements.

Useful software, unglamorous chores

Consider Browserless. Its founder, Joel Griffith, encountered the problem while working at Elastic: generating customer PDFs grew into a distracting engineering burden. Browserless turned browser automation into infrastructure other developers could use. Polychrome’s investment announcement in January 2022 described its own contribution as go-to-market work, finance and operations.

Today, Browserless offers infrastructure for scraping, testing, screenshots, PDFs and AI agents. Its website reports more than 2,000 paying customers. The practical appeal is straightforward: teams can automate browser work while spending less engineering effort maintaining the machinery underneath it.

Checkbox shows another side of the job. In May 2024 it released version 8, its first major product update in more than five years. The work included modernizing application infrastructure and adding enterprise authentication support. An October update described a redesigned interface, expanded support coverage and regular business reviews with enterprise customers.

These are concrete changes a software customer can recognize. Checkbox reported more than 500 customers in October 2024, split evenly between hosted and on-premises offerings. Supporting both means attending to installations, security and service as well as features. Buying the company creates a long list of obligations to its existing users.

Before the next sales hire

Polychrome’s published advice offers something founders can use without selling anything. In his sales-efficiency essay, Althauser compares new bookings with sales capacity: the total quota assigned to the team, adjusted for sellers still getting up to speed. Before hiring, ask whether the business lacks selling capacity or sufficient demand.

His marketing argument is similarly practical. Paid channels become difficult when larger competitors can afford more for each customer. He recommends checking whether market, product, purchasing model and distribution channel fit together. A cheap click is of little use if the person clicking cannot buy what the company sells.

A partnership needs a particular problem

The model has conditions. Polychrome seeks businesses with product-market fit. Sales expertise cannot establish that customers need an unwanted product. A founder committed to retaining every share also has an obvious reason to keep building independently. Venture funding, hiring specialists and selling outright remain alternatives with different costs and obligations.

The portfolio has widened. Polychrome’s current website includes website-feedback tool Marker.io, database-backed infrastructure platform Stategraph and deployment platform Dokploy alongside its earlier companies. In January 2026, origination lead Dennis Huang described Dokploy as its first Latin American investment and discussed shared marketing and accounting services and an Amsterdam presence.

The useful lesson travels beyond acquisitions: identify which job is holding the company back. Then put somebody capable in charge of it. For a technical founder, that may mean sharing ownership. It may also mean getting back the time to build the product that made the business worth buying.