FE International Advises HappyOrNot, Investors and Management on Verdane’s Majority Ownership

New York, USA, August 27th, 2026, FinanceWire

The transaction marks the change of control to the company's longest-standing institutional backer, and clears the way for HappyOrNot's move from customer feedback into real-time operational intelligence.

FE International, Inc., the global market leader in technology mergers and acquisitions, advised HappyOrNot, the Finnish company behind the Smiley feedback terminals, and separately advised the Company's selling shareholders, including existing investors; Verdane, Northzone and AirTree Ventures, and members of the Company's management team and employee shareholders, on the sale of their respective holdings to Verdane, the European specialist growth buyout firm. Verdane, an existing minority investor since 2019, has increased its position to a majority stake in the business.

HappyOrNot started with a bad afternoon in an electronics shop. Heikki Väänänen was a teenager, got poor service, and found there was no way to tell anyone about it. Two decades later he and Ville Levaniemi founded the company in Tampere, Finland, in 2009, around a device with four buttons and four faces. They started with two buttons. Customers told them four worked better. A Finnish supermarket group signed first, Heathrow Airport followed, and the terminal went on to become one of the most recognised customer feedback solutions across retail and other customer-facing environments. 

The business that sold in 2026 is not the hardware company it began as. Smiley Terminal, Smiley Touch, Smiley Digital and Smiley Sign create a continuous stream of in-the-moment operational data, turning customer experience into signals that can be analysed, activated and integrated into the systems and workflows organisations use to run their operations. More than 4,000 brands across 135 countries run on it, including Amazon, Sodexo , Heathrow Airport and Aramark. Over two billion feedback responses have been collected in the moment and at the point of experience, rather than through traditional retrospective surveys.

Fifteen years also produces a complicated shareholder register. HappyOrNot raised across several rounds, including a $14.5 million Series A in 2017 backed by Northzone and AirTree Ventures, and a $25 million growth round led by Verdane in 2019.

FE International ran the process on behalf of the Company and its selling shareholders, resulting in a simplified ownership structure with Verdane, already a shareholder since 2019, now a controlling majority owner alongside the company's management team going forward.

“HappyOrNot is a rare asset. It is a category-defining business with a physical footprint no pure software company can replicate, sitting on a proprietary dataset that gets more valuable every year. Two billion responses collected at the point of service is not something a competitor can buy or scrape. Running a process for the Company and coordinating multiple selling shareholders with an existing investor moving to control is not trivial, and it's why we structured separate advisory workstreams for each party to get to one clean signing,” said Max Alderman, Partner at FE International.

HappyOrNot owns one of the largest datasets of its kind and gathers it in places that are difficult to reach any other way, including airport terminals, supermarket exits, hospital corridors and bank branches. Erling Amble, board member at HappyOrNot and investor at Verdane, has described the same shift, pointing to demand moving away from retrospective online feedback and towards real-time data embedded directly in operational systems.

The transaction landed alongside a change at the top. Tim Waterton, Chief Revenue Officer since 2021, stepped up to Chief Executive Officer, and Carl Holmquist took over as Chairman. Waterton has spent more than 30 years in enterprise software, including a business he co-founded that was later acquired by BMC Software, plus senior roles at M-Files and RainStor and earlier positions at the London Stock Exchange and Accenture. His plan is to push HappyOrNot beyond measurement and into real-time operational intelligence, closing the last mile of customer experience by turning continuous microfeedback into activated data, integrated directly into the operational flow of organisations so frontline teams can act while there is still time to make a difference.

About HappyOrNot

HappyOrNot is a Finnish customer experience and operational intelligence technology company founded in 2009 by Heikki Väänänen and Ville Levaniemi. Headquartered in Tampere with a US office and a global reseller network, it captures in-the-moment microfeedback through its Smiley touchpoints and turns those signals into real-time operational intelligence, helping organisations understand performance, identify issues and improve customer experiences. HappyOrNot works with more than 4,000 organisations across 135 countries in retail, healthcare, transport, hospitality and public services.

About Verdane

Verdane is a specialist growth buyout investment firm backing tech-enabled and sustainable businesses across Europe. Verdane funds have raised €10 billion and made more than 200 investments since 2003, with over 180 investment professionals and operating experts across Berlin, Copenhagen, London, Helsinki, Munich, Oslo and Stockholm. Verdane is a certified B Corporation and invests as a majority or minority holder, in single companies or in portfolios.

About FE International

Founded in 2010, FE International is an award-winning strategic advisor for technology businesses. FE’s team has completed over 1,500 transactions with a combined value of over $50 billion. FE International was named one of The Americas’ Fastest Growing Companies from 2020 to 2024 by the Financial Times and is also a seven-time Inc. 5000 company.

For more information, users can visit www.feinternational.com.

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