HiddenLevers
👤 Praveen Ghanta (MIT CS + economics who worked inside financial services — he understood both the risk modeling and how advisors sell and buy.)🌐 sitehirefraction.comLinkedIn
Retail investors and brokers rejected it. Advisors paid 10x for the same tool to show clients what a crash would do.
Will it work? · our read
Priced upmarket. No tech moat — Riskalyze had the math too. HiddenLevers won by moving upmarket to advisors, 10x'ing price, and selling to Orion when strategics were paying up for the category.
01How the money moves
An advisory firm buys a HiddenLevers subscription
→
Advisors run macro stress-tests in reviews and proposals
→
HiddenLevers books recurring ARR at 51% margin
02The numbers
$8M
ARR at exit
podcast
16x
revenue multiple
TheyGotAcq
51%
pre-tax margin
TheyGotAcq
Bootstrapped, no funding; about 60% growth for 9 straight years. TheyGotAcquired
$8M ARR at exit, about 51% pre-tax margin, sold to Orion at 16x revenue (2021).
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(demo: preview the full teardown)Sourcesupdated · daily
Practical Founders #61 - Praveen Ghanta, founder interview ($8M ARR, 16x)TheyGotAcquired - HiddenLevers acquired by Orion in a 16x revenue saleBusinessWire - Orion acquires HiddenLevers (2021 press release)Institutional Investor - Orion acquires HiddenLevers, eyeing BlackRock and MSCIWikipedia - HiddenLevers
Revenue ($8M ARR), the 16x multiple, and customer counts (450 firms, about 3,000 advisors) are founder-disclosed by Praveen Ghanta on Practical Founders #61 and corroborated by TheyGotAcquired; sourced STATED, verified. The exact sale price was not officially disclosed - the "$128M" figure elsewhere is TheyGotAcquired's 16x-of-$8M math, not an official number, so it is left out of the tiles. The "keep clients calm / retention" angle is [our read] of why advisors paid; the documented facts are the 2010-2011 retail rejection, the pivot to advisors, the $30->$300 price raise, and use in proposals and reviews. Co-founded with Raj Udeshi. We never score you.