Beacon Software Acquires RealEstateAPI

"The most intensely personal, intimate thing that you as a founder, you as a business person, will ever do is sell a company that you've built from scratch." That insight comes from Vincent Harris, CEO and co-founder of RealEstateAPI, a company that develops APIs that give applications and AI workflows programmatic access to property data.  Harris, with Corum as his M&A advisor, successfully sold his business to AI infrastructure company Beacon Software in March 2026. 

Harris notes that the M&A process can be emotional for the seller. "There are questions that you begin to take personally. It can be a little bit of an adversarial thing that happens between you and the buyer."  Harris adds it was very important to have an experienced competent M&A advisor like Corum to keep things on an even keel and not let those sensitive items derail the deal.

Working with Corum

Harris co-founded RealEstateAPI in 2022 with Justin Winthers, Harris taking the role of CEO and Winthers working as the Chief Technology Officer. The company had actually morphed from a previous business that the pair started ‒ a digital marketing platform for real estate investors. RealEstateAPI grew out of Harris's and Winthers' belief that providing APIs that made it easy for application developers to access real estate data was an even better business model. And they were right. Over the next few years, RealEstateAPI had steadily grown in revenue and maintained profitability as it scaled.

Harris's initial interaction with Corum was purely educational. He viewed a Corum webinar and then attended a number of Corum educational events about the M&A process. But he and Winthers were not thinking at the time of selling their company. Harris recalls, "We felt like we were really too early to do a transaction." Nevertheless, they felt that having a relationship with Corum was worthwhile and at some point they would benefit from Corum's services.

Eventually, the founders realized that RealEstateAPI had reached a point where it would be attractive to buyers, and it was time, in Harris's words to "take some chips off the table." Another motivating factor was eliminating the risk any business faces in an unpredictable future. "We had a lot invested, all of our net worth was essentially in this," recalls Harris. It was time he says to "de-risk our families."

Going to market 

One of the things that attracted Harris to Corum was their comprehensive, disciplined M&A process. "In the lower middle market you don't often have as robust a process as what we experienced at Corum," states Harris. "I wasn't sure that that level of support and advisory would be available given the size of our company. But it was. ” That process, backed by the largest buyer database in the industry, includes a global search designed to find multiple seriously-interested buyers. And that is exactly what happened. After choosing Corum as its M&A advisor, Corum’s advisory team took RealEstateAPI out to market in the Spring of 2025, which quickly resulted in finding multiple buyers interested in acquiring the company. "We had multiple offers," remembers Harris, "but they were not as high as I wanted." Harris then decided to take advantage of Corum's hiatus program.

Taking advantage of hiatus

Corum offers tech company sellers something unique in the M&A market: a hiatus program ‒ an opportunity for sellers to pause their participation in the M&A process with the intention of returning to it at a later time when conditions are more favorable. Taking a hiatus also gives sellers the time to address issues that buyers identified during the M&A process, issues that can stand in the way of getting an excellent offer.

"When we first went to market,” Harris notes, “our Corum advisor told us that if we were unhappy with the offers, we could take advantage of something called hiatus. He explained that meant that we could basically push pause on the process and come back after some time when the business had grown or added a layer to our story. And that's what we ultimately decided to do."

After a few months on hiatus, Harris returned to the process with a better story to present to prospective buyers.  "Over those few months we were able to generate more profit, more EBITDA, out of the business. And we were a more attractive candidate when we came back.”

Finding the right buyer

When Harris returned to the process the buyers who were originally interested we're still there. But another prospective buyer, Beacon Software, entered the picture. Although Harris received a good offer from another prospective buyer, he ultimately chose Beacon. He says, "We had another offer that had more cash up front, but what Beacon offered, while it was a little bit less up front, gave us considerably more upside."  

Learning from the process

Asked what he learned going through the M&A process that could serve as advice for founders selling their company, Harris cited a number of things. First, founders should consider doing an M&A transaction if they have a good story to tell ‒ even if they think it's too early. He put it this way: "When we first engaged with Corum, we thought we were too early. We were 2 1/2 years into the current incarnation of the business. We were growing quickly, but we felt like we had something special that we could grow and scale to really significant numbers. But our advisor's point was, 'Yes, you probably can scale it, but you have a story that will sell right now and you can sell that growth story.' And so I would say to founders, if you find yourself in that situation, you should at least entertain the process."

Harris also stressed the importance of engaging a good advisory firm, one that he says, "can give you the pulse of the market and see what your firm would fetch.” He also noted that a good advisor can be emotionally supportive and can “help you to see your blind spots so that you can be your best self as you go to the process."

Additionally, Harris highlighted the value of focusing on the political, economic, and macro factors that can affect the M&A market. "We were in the middle of a new administration as we were coming into the M&A market," Harris says, "and there was a lot of uncertainty there. Our Corum advisor did a very good job of reminding us of that. He told us  ‘You really don't know what's going to happen 18 months or 24 months down the road when you hit this revenue target that you have for yourself. But what you do know is that you've got a good business that's growing quickly and it's profitable and that I can sell.' We believe that was great advice."

Life after the deal

After the deal, life hasn’t changed dramatically for Harris. "I'm still running the business day-to-day," he says, "though with a bit more support from our acquirer, which I'm very grateful for. However, he and his family have done some fun things to celebrate the deal. "My wife and I have done one fun trip and we'll do a closing dinner with the broader team. We'll also do a big trip at the end of the year with our family and let them celebrate alongside us."

Harris envisions more change coming in the future. He sees it this way: "I think that the material change in my day-to-day is probably nine months-to-a-year away. I suspect I will find my replacement at some point. I don't know what the future looks like after that. But right now I'm just enjoying having additional support, more buyer power, and the recognition in the market of what we’ve built so far."