Most of the deals this newsroom covers are priced on a story. This one is priced on a spreadsheet, which makes it more useful than its size suggests.
On 3 September 2026, SmartCraft announced it had acquired LiveCosts, an Irish cloud cost-control platform for small and mid-sized contractors, at an enterprise value of €8.45 million. €6.20 million was paid at closing. The remaining €2.25 million is contingent — payable, in the company’s words, “pending continued strong growth in ARR combined with improved profitability up until the end of 2029.”
The Arithmetic
LiveCosts entered the deal with €1.77 million of annual recurring revenue and an EBITDA-capex margin of 15 percent. Both its ARR and its customer count are up 60 percent against the same point last year. It serves what SmartCraft describes as “hundreds of customers.”
Set the enterprise value against the revenue and you get roughly 4.8 times ARR. Set only the cash paid at closing against it and you get roughly 3.5 times, with the rest deferred to a 2029 gate and conditioned on the business continuing to do what it has been doing.
A profitable, 60%-growth SaaS business changed hands at under five times revenue. That is the benchmark worth keeping.
For a company growing 60 percent a year and generating positive EBITDA, that is a disciplined price. It is the kind of multiple that gets paid for a real business with real cash flows, by an acquirer that intends to own it rather than to tell a story about it.
The contrast with the venture market is the reason to write it down. This newsroom spends most of its time covering construction software companies raising at valuations that, where they are visible at all, imply multiples several times this one, on revenue bases that are frequently smaller and rarely profitable. Those are different instruments priced by different buyers for different reasons, and a strategic acquisition is not a venture round. But it is a useful calibration: when a European strategic with a listed balance sheet actually transacts on a growing, profitable construction SaaS asset, this is what it pays.
What LiveCosts Does
LiveCosts is described in the announcement as “a cloud-based cost control platform for SME contractors” that “gives SME contractors live control of project budgets and costs.”
That is a plainer problem than most of what gets covered as construction technology, and a more universal one. A small contractor running six jobs does not usually lose money because of a clash between a duct and a beam. It loses money because supplier invoices arrive weeks after the materials did, because labour hours land in a different system from costs, and because the true position of a job is only knowable at the point when it is too late to change it. Software that closes that lag does not need a model behind it to be worth paying for.
Notably, this is not an AI acquisition, and nobody involved has claimed it is. It is a competent cost-tracking product with recurring revenue and positive margins being bought by a larger operator in the same market.
The Buyer
SmartCraft is a Nordic provider of software for craftsmen and construction businesses. Per its own about page, the group consists of 270 employees serving more than 13,400 customers across Norway, Sweden, Finland, Ireland and the UK. It listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange on 24 June 2021, and in Q1 2026 relisted on Nasdaq Stockholm’s main market.
The company framed the deal as strengthening its UK position, though it already lists both Ireland and the UK among its five markets. LiveCosts adds an established, profitable product in a geography SmartCraft already touches — a consolidation move rather than an entry.
Jeremias Jansson, chief executive of SmartCraft, and Ciarán Brennan, chief executive and co-founder of LiveCosts, both appear in the announcement. LiveCosts’ founders and management will continue to lead the business.
That last detail matters more than it reads. An earn-out that runs to the end of 2029 only functions if the people capable of hitting it are still there to try, and structuring over a quarter of the consideration behind a 2029 gate is a fairly direct statement about who SmartCraft thinks the value is attached to.
Where It Sits
European construction software consolidation has been steady rather than dramatic. Nemetschek’s acquisition of HCSS redrew a section of the map at a considerably larger scale, and Trimble’s purchase of Document Crunch folded contract AI into an incumbent suite. Procore paying $845 million for DroneDeploy sits at the far end of the same spectrum.
An €8.45 million tuck-in does not reshape anything. But it prices a category that mostly gets valued by analogy, and it does so with the numerator and the denominator both disclosed — which is rarer than it should be.
