[joschmo]

That's a really interesting question as I rarely think of a company from pre-seed to series C as having profitability. If they have the cash on balance sheet to do smart M&A, it would only be worthwhile if the company had the human capacity to source, diligence, and integrate without compromising the core product. Integrating is the most important part of that because that's where all of the value is generated and tends to eat a ton of everyone's time. That's going to be series C/$20M+ of ARR at the earliest usually. Even then it's buying a team or niche technology, not a complete product/business/ So the answer to M&A is a yes with a lot of caveats.

Otherwise, if you are a profitable, late-stage company, why would you raise money at all? Either spend your profits down close to 0 to achieve business goals and only raise some money if you've got non-dilutive ROI (i.e. the margins on this new spend are superior or equal to existing margins in your profitable business and you are in land grab mode). Or just be comfortable with your current trajectory because of how well-defended you are financially. From a risk management perspective, founders should be able to live with going from $10 to $20M in ARR this year at break-even instead of $10 to $30M by burning $5-20M if it means your business gets to continue existing.