Work — Riley, 2010–2022
A business built to be worth buying.
Riley was founded in 2010, when the cloud services market was still in its infancy. Over eleven years it became an Australian cloud consultancy working with mid-market and enterprise clients — cloud-native transformation, data supply chain, cloud operations — with deep Google Cloud specialisation.
In September 2021 it was acquired by NCS, a Singtel company, as part of Singtel's move to build a B2B services champion across Asia. What that sentence leaves out is the decade of deliberate work that made it possible.
Architected for value, years early
A business is not made valuable at the point of sale. It is made valuable by the shape it is given years before: which revenue is recurring and which is project, how delivery scales without the founder, where the margin actually comes from, what a buyer can integrate versus what only works because of who runs it. Riley was engineered against those questions long before there was a transaction — a low-cost delivery model that made new platforms affordable to adopt, recurring revenue for survival, and practices that ran without their founder in the room.
Running the process, not being run by it
Tom ran the M&A process as founder and managing director, with advisors alongside rather than in front — Grant Thornton acted on the sale. He positioned the business to a strategic buyer, held the narrative through months of diligence, and turned a founder-built company into a form a multinational could underwrite. Riley was one of three acquisitions NCS announced that month, across Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia.
The part most founders never do
Signing is the halfway mark. Riley continued under its own leadership after close, and the work turned to integration: fitting a founder-led practice into a multinational's operating model without breaking what made it work, and growing the line of business across Southeast Asia. That is where enterprise value is either realised or quietly lost — and it is the reason a residency is designed to leave capability behind rather than dependence.
This is the experience Humanloop brings inside other people's companies — in residence. hello@humanloop.co