Exit51 Guides Start-Up Sales Valued at Up to €10 Million

Vienna-based Michael Jiresch has built Exit51 around a niche many advisers ignore: selling profitable startups and smaller companies with an enterprise value of up to about €10 million. These are not giant corporate transactions. They are often the biggest financial decision a founder will ever make.

Exit51 says its sweet spot is companies with EBIT of roughly €250,000 to €1 million and annual revenue of up to about €10 million. The firm is focused on SaaS, e-commerce, edtech, digital health services, agencies and other technology-driven businesses. Jiresch’s pitch is simple enough: traditional M&A advisers usually chase larger mandates, where the economics are easier to justify.

He argues the market is bigger than many people think. Exit51 points to the Austrian Startup Monitor, which said 38 percent of Austrian startups were profitable in its 2024 edition. The 2023 edition counted more than 3,400 startups founded since 2012. That is a lot of potential exits if even a slice of those companies decide to sell instead of raise more money.

Jiresch says he brings about 15 years of buy-side M&A experience from large corporations, plus about five years helping scale-ups build sales operations and go-to-market strategy. He moved out of the corporate world in 2024 and now works on the sell side. His partner, Johannes Angerer, adds more than 15 years in the digital sector, including work in the Chinese e-commerce market and across consumer goods, retail, tourism and furniture retail.

So far, Jiresch says he has advised on three exits, though he cannot name the companies because of confidentiality. Exit51’s website lists anonymized work for a B2C health education platform, a B2C direct sales platform and a digital agency, all around or above the €5 million mark in enterprise value. The firm also says it has handled a logistics startup worth more than €10 million and an e-commerce SaaS startup’s Series B rounds. To keep the process lean, it uses A.I. for research, market analysis, buyer matching and parts of due diligence, while keeping negotiations human.

Exit51 is not inventing a new market so much as packaging an overlooked one. Austria already has the Chamber of Commerce’s business succession exchange, and sites like Acquire.com handle small software sales internationally. Still, the fact that founders now need a specialist for sub-€10 million exits says plenty about where startup Europe has ended up: too big for hobbyism, too small for the old guard.