EdTech Sales — Small Business M&A
Steve Biondi
I sell software to school districts, and I build the deals that let small business owners pass their companies on to the people who already run them.
Chicago, IL
I sell software to school districts, and I build the deals that let small business owners pass their companies on to the people who already run them.
I run a southern US territory for Finalsite, selling website and communications platforms to K-12 school districts. The job is consultative: understanding a district's board cycle, its incumbent vendor, and where the current tools are quietly failing staff and families.
Before Finalsite, I was the first US sales hire at Kahoot!, and held roles at Kinderlime and PATHWAYos/Vector Solutions. Eight-plus years in EdTech SaaS, mostly outbound.
New Wave Capital is a Chicago-based firm I built to solve a specific problem: a retiring small business owner with no buyer, and a long-tenured employee who already runs the place but can't finance a purchase. We structure the deal using SBA 7(a) financing, and New Wave takes a minority equity stake plus a structuring fee.
I work brokers and deal partners across Chicago, Austin, and Connecticut, alongside a Live Oak Bank contact on the lending side and a CPA co-founder on structuring.
I've spent most of my career on the outbound side of B2B sales, selling into senior decision-makers at school districts. That same instinct, find the person with the real problem and the authority to solve it, is what led me to small business M&A. Retiring owners and their long-tenured employees have almost never met a banker or a broker who could actually get them to a closing table.
I've also run and closed a handful of my own ventures, in consumer products, local services, and content. The lesson that carried over into New Wave: validate demand before you build the infrastructure, not after. That discipline shows up in how I qualify a deal, a prospect, or an idea before I commit time to it.
Selling to a K-12 district, weighing an ownership transition, or something else entirely. Send a note and I'll reply directly.