Investment Criteria

Like most investment firms, Flagship aims to invest in companies with sound business models that possess significant market potential and are led by exceptional management teams.  We are  focused on technology-enabled service firms broadly and  Software-as-a-Service (“SaaS”) companies in particular .
 
The term SaaS does not yet have a universally understood definition. For us, to be a SaaS business, a company must:

• Develop and own a proprietary business application or service,
• The application must be web-native, that is designed from inception for use by customers through the Internet.  As such it must be:
  • Environment-centric in that is designed and implemented in only one operating system and database,
  • Multi-tenant in that multiple customers are served simultaneously in one instance of the application, and
  • Hosted in an Internet data center and not on the customer’s premise.

We are primarily interested in SaaS firms which are targeting businesses as their customers rather than consumers.
 
Application Service Providers (“ASPs”) which host and deliver applications developed and owned by others are not SaaS.  Traditional independent software companies (“ISVs”) with on-premise client-server applications that are tailored for hosted delivery are not what we consider SaaS.
 
For early-stage investments, Flagship’s initial investment will typically be between $100,000 and $500,000.  With participation in following rounds, our investment will often increase to a total of $1 million to $2 million. We do not fund ideas but rather companies that have an operative service, customers and revenue. 
 
Our investment in change-of-control transactions will reflect the size and value of the company being acquired.
 

The Flagship team has over 65 years of collective experience in founding, investing in and actively helping to build successful emerging growth companies.  Our partners' private equity and operating experience ranges from large blue-chip enterprises such as J.D. Edwards, Lockheed Martin, Smith Barney and Dun & Bradstreet to start-ups and includes several pioneering on-demand companies. As entrepreneurs ourselves, we understand what it means to pursue a vision with passion and what it takes to turn that vision into reality.