Andrew GazdeckiSerial Entrepreneur Driving Startup Acquisitions

Why Buyers Pay Different Prices for the Same Startup

14 Dec 2025 · 1 min

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Andrew Gazdecki explains why the same startup can command different prices from different buyers. Financial buyers like private equity use profit multiples to value companies and expect returns in five years. Strategic buyers like Google or Apple pay more because they gain new markets, services, or customers to cross-sell.

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What's the difference between a financial buyer and a strategic buyer? A financial buyer is a buyer that's going to be valuing your business on a multiple, typically EBITDA or net profit. So they're going to be paying a multiple on profit to receive the profit back to recoup their investment over five years. And a strategic buyer is typically a larger company that is buying your company to enter a different market or to expand services that they offer to a specific type of customer. So an easier way to think of it, financial buyers typically a private equity firm, they have different reasons for buying businesses but it's typically always financial and a strategic buyer, you can think of them as a large company, Google, Apple, et cetera, you know, maybe a competitor that's around the same size as you and they're acquiring businesses to specifically grow their existing company by expanding services to have more products to sell to their existing customers, move into a different market.