Deals

How One Family Built an $8 Billion Software Startup

SAP is paying $8 billion in cash for Ryan Smith’s Qualtrics
Utah-based software company had been planning to go public

Bill McDermott, chief executive officer at SAP, says buying Qualtrics changes his company fundamentally.Daybreak: Americas." (Source: Bloomberg)

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By Alex Barinka and Mark Milian

November 12, 2018 at 5:00 AM UTC

Updated on

November 13, 2018 at 4:35 AM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

The tech industry’s newest billionaires are a pair of brothers who started a software company in their parents’ basement in Utah. Now Ryan and Jared Smith are selling Qualtrics International Inc. to European giant SAP SE for $8 billion -- and they’ll get to keep running the business.

Ryan, 40, is the chief executive and public face of a startup that -- unusually -- resisted taking venture money for over a decade before finally agreeing to deals with Accel and Sequoia Capital. Last valued at $2.5 billion, Qualtrics makes customer-survey software used by the likes of Microsoft Corp. to General Electric Co., helping boost its revenue more than eight-fold over the past seven years.