According to Diario Financiero, siblings Elvira and Gustavo Montero sold Bsale, the software company they founded 20 years ago in Puerto Varas, in the Los Lagos region, a few weeks ago. The buyer is Siigo, which is backed by the Accel-KKR fund. No other outlet has confirmed the transaction, and the source does not report the price.
Bsale has 13 thousand clients and sales exceeding US$ 15 million a year, according to the same outlet. The company rents cloud-based sales software to retailers, replacing the cash register with a computer and a printer.
The siblings started with custom software. Elvira, a business graduate of the Catholic University (UC), handled the commercial side. Gustavo, who holds a postgraduate qualification in optimization from the same university, managed the technology. One of their assignments was a fish biomass simulator for salmon producer Trusal. Their father, an entrepreneur who created the Las Tacas resort near Coquimbo, was the investor and guaranteed their first bank loan.
That model could not scale because each project required hiring new people. In 2012, they decided to turn their clients' common problems into simple software and rent it out instead of selling licenses. Their father, who was on the board, had doubts. "This isn't going to work," he told them, according to Elvira's account.
Elvira, who describes herself as shy, took a Google Ads course and went from store to store around Puerto Varas' town square. In parallel, they developed expense and payroll products, but abandoned the latter after about ten months when they discovered there was extensive competition at low prices. They stuck with sales, and that was how Bsale was born.
They chose not to charge per user, the usual practice in software as a service, because sharing a single account is common in Latin America. Pricing was tied to the size of each company.
They joined Endeavor, a support network for entrepreneurs, when their annual sales were below US$ 1 million. A mentor advised them not to expand beyond Chile until they had 2,000 clients. In 2018, they entered Peru. They first tried selling from Chile, but that did not work, so they set up an operation suited to that market's rules.
There were setbacks along the way. When the team had grown to 30 people working in a rented house in Puerto Varas, all their computers were stolen. Elvira bought replacements in Puerto Montt, about 20 kilometers away. Later, Google suspended their Google Ads account, their only source of potential clients, over a discrepancy in tax payments on digital services.
Diario Financiero does not report what will change for Bsale's employees or clients following the sale to Siigo, or whether the company will continue operating from Puerto Varas.
