The monthly briefing for IT services founders, investors, and M&A advisors.
In This Edition
Half-time. Since March I have tracked and commented on more than forty IT services transactions in this newsletter, one month at a time. This month I step back and look at the whole board. There is no guest in the Spotlight this time. Instead I answer the seven questions founders actually ask me, the ones that come up once the formal part of the conversation is over. Plus the two public takeovers that just repriced European IT services.
Five minutes. That is all you need. Let's go.
What I See Right Now · My half-time verdict on IT services M&A
Featured Whitepaper · AI-Native, fully updated for H2 2026
Founder Office Hours · The seven questions founders ask me most
Deal Radar · Two public takeovers and a widening buyer universe
On My Radar · What I am reading this summer
What I See Right Now
My Half-Time Verdict on IT Services M&A
In January the open question was whether 2026 would be the year AI stopped being a slide in the equity story and became a line item in diligence. Six months and more than forty tracked deals later, here is my half-time verdict, in three shifts.
The enterprise execution gap became the demand engine.
OMMAX, Ibexa and Make surveyed 250 European decision makers this spring. 58 percent now have a fully defined AI strategy. Only 44 percent have an operating model that can actually deliver it. Nearly four in five AI initiatives fail at or after the pilot, and integration complexity is the single biggest barrier, ahead of talent and budget. Read those numbers as an IT services founder and you are looking at your order book for the next three years. The distance between AI ambition and AI execution is exactly where specialised services firms earn their keep, and buyers have noticed.
AI moved from the equity story to the diligence checklist.
In March I wrote that AI capability is being acquired, not built. That has hardened into pricing. GP Bullhound’s June report notes that AI took the majority of global venture value for the first time last year, and the same logic now runs through services M&A: buyers pay up for teams that have put AI into production and discount delivery models that still sell hours. Sophora’s stated thesis for its SQUER investment says the quiet part out loud: standardised development is under growing pressure from AI, and value is concentrating in senior, client-facing engineering. Persistent is not paying a 140 percent premium for Nagarro’s headcount. It is paying for AI-powered engineering at scale.
The buyer universe went public, and global.
Two public takeover offers for listed German IT services companies within three weeks. Persistent from India at 81 euros per share for Nagarro. VINCI from France at 67.50 euros for All for One, a 95 percent premium for a company that had cut its forecast weeks earlier. Add Apheon’s entry into Easi in Belgium, a Swiss foundation buying into Netcloud, and family-backed platforms like Sequotech reaching ten companies, and the conclusion is unavoidable: if your mental list of potential buyers is eighteen months old, it is obsolete.
What I expect in the second half: more take-privates while public markets underprice IT services, succession-driven supply meeting programmatic buy-and-build demand, and the multiple gap between AI-ready delivery and hours-based delivery getting wider, not narrower. The founders who use the summer to prepare will be the ones the autumn is kind to. Which brings me to the questions below.
“Buyers no longer pay for what you say about AI. They pay for what your delivery already runs on.”
Updated Whitepaper
The AI-Native IT Services Company
AI-native delivery in practice · the metrics buyers test in diligence · hours to outcomes · protecting margin and multiple
Revised from the ground up for the second half of 2026, with what six months of deal flow taught us about AI-native delivery, margins, and multiples. If you read one thing from me this summer, make it this. Free download.
Four editions, four guests: Rachel Linnemann (CEO, tecRacer), Michael Müller (co-founder, re:cinq), Stefan Biehler (enterprise architect, KRITIS), Frank Strecker (CEO, Skaylink). This month the roles flip. No guest and no prepared slides, just the seven questions founders ask me most often, usually once the official agenda is done. They arrive in different words every week, but the substance is always the same. Here is how I answer them across the table.
1. “What is my company actually worth right now?”
The honest answer is a corridor, not a number. Small specialised IT services companies in DACH trade at roughly 6 to 8 times EBITDA. Platform-grade assets trade at 10 to 13. Where you land inside that corridor is not luck. It is recurring revenue share, growth, depth of specialisation, client concentration, and how replaceable you are as a founder. And do not anchor on headlines: Persistent paying a 140 percent premium for Nagarro tells you something about scarce listed assets, not about your 8 million euro business. The multiple you get is the multiple your risk profile earns.
2. “Should I sell now, or wait two years for a better number?”
That is the wrong frame. If the only reason to wait is a bigger number, ask what two more years of the AI shift do to your risk profile. Waiting works when you use it: to build recurring revenue, to take yourself out of the critical path, to put AI into delivery. Waiting simply to be older is negative carry. Sell when your equity story peaks, not when your energy runs out. Right now demand is deep and the supply of quality assets is thin. That is a seller’s tailwind, but only for prepared sellers.
3. “What does AI actually do to my valuation?”
It splits the market. Buyers now test three things early: the trend in margin per employee, the share of delivery running on your own accelerators and agents, and how you price, hours or outcomes. Firms that can show AI in production get the premium end of the corridor. Time-and-material-heavy models get discounted for the transition risk the buyer has to fund. The uncomfortable maths from the March edition still stands: if delivery efficiency improves by 30 percent and you bill hours, your top line shrinks. Buyers can do that maths too.
4. “Do I have to sell 100 percent?”
No, and increasingly you should not. Look at this month alone: Easi’s founder and more than a hundred employee shareholders keep significant ownership alongside Apheon. SQUER’s four founders remain invested and keep running the company. tiag’s management takes equity in the Sequotech group. Majority with reinvestment, minority growth capital, staged exits, all of it is on the table in this market. Retained equity in a properly integrated platform is often worth more than the first cheque. My own bias at Fund I is exactly that: we want founders invested alongside us, not waving from the car park.
5. “When should I start preparing, and what actually moves the needle?”
Twelve to twenty-four months before you want to sign, and the levers are the same four I keep writing about: recurring revenue up, no client above twenty percent, delivery that does not rest on three key people, processes written down. Add monthly reporting a CFO can defend and a data room that does not need archaeology. Everything else is decoration. The levers are boring, which is exactly why they pay.
6. “What kills deals late in the process?”
Surprises. Almost never the number itself. A customer concentration nobody mentioned, IP sitting in the wrong entity, a key person with no retention agreement, figures that get restated in week six. Price kills deals rarely; eroded trust kills them constantly. So tell your advisor the ugly things in month one. Disclosed early, a problem is a footnote. Discovered late, it is an exit ramp.
7. “Would you buy my company?”
Maybe, and I will tell you quickly. Fund I looks for profitable, specialised IT services companies with 5 to 30 million euros of revenue and more than 2 million EBITDA, founder-owned, below the institutional radar, in segments where operator experience makes the difference. Most companies I meet do not fit, and I say so early, together with what I would fix first, no charge. Which is, more or less, what this section is for.
A question I did not cover? Hit reply and send it over. I will take it on in a future edition.
Deal Radar
My picks since the June edition closed on 24 June, cross-checked against the last four issues so nothing repeats. This was supposed to be the quiet season. It turned into the loudest month of the year.
🇮🇳 Persistent Systems bids €81 per share for Nagarro (Munich) • announced 27 June 2026
Pune-based Persistent, with a market capitalisation of roughly seven billion euros, signed a business combination agreement with Nagarro and launched a voluntary public offer at 81 euros in cash, around 140 percent above the undisturbed close and valuing Nagarro’s share capital at just over one billion euros. Roughly a fifth of the shares from the founder circle is already committed, the board supports the offer, no domination agreement for two years, delisting planned, closing expected between Q4 2026 and Q1 2027. The stated ambition: a global leader in AI-powered engineering. Six years after its spin-off from Allgeier, Nagarro leaves the public market at double what the market said it was worth the week before. Remember that the next time someone tells you listed multiples are the truth about private ones.
🇫🇷 VINCI Energies offers €67.50 per share for All for One (Filderstadt) • 16 July 2026
The second public takeover of a German-listed IT services company within three weeks. VINCI’s cash offer sits 95.5 percent above the prior close, with 54.7 percent of the shares already secured and full board support. All for One, the SAP mid-market champion with more than 4,500 clients and around 504 million euros of revenue, had cut its forecast in May. VINCI is buying the transformation, not the momentum, and folding it into Axians, its 3.8 billion euro digital services brand. When a CAC 40 industrial pays a near-100 percent premium for a company in mid-restructuring, that is a statement about the strategic value of SAP mid-market access.
🤝 Apheon partners with Easi (Belgium) • late June 2026
The first institutional capital in Easi’s 27-year history. The Nivelles and Leuven based group runs two divisions, its proprietary Adfinity ERP software and a managed IT arm spanning cybersecurity and sovereign private cloud, serves more than 1,500 clients with over 650 people, and counts more than a hundred employee shareholders after twelve consecutive Best Workplace Belgium titles. Founder Salvatore Curaba, the co-CEOs and the employee shareholders all retain significant ownership, and the employee model is explicitly preserved as cross-border buy and build begins. The detail I like most: the ownership culture that built the asset is being treated as part of the asset.
🧠 Sophora Unternehmerkapital invests in SQUER (Vienna and Munich) • announced 1 July 2026
A mid eight figure investment into the 100-plus person engineering firm serving banks, insurers and the public sector. The four founders stay significantly invested and keep running the business; the plan is a DACH platform for software modernisation and applied AI, organic growth plus targeted add-ons, with managed AI services building the recurring layer. Sophora’s investment thesis deserves quoting in every IT services board deck this year: standardised development is under growing pressure from AI, and growth is concentrating in the senior, client-facing engineering segment.
📊 Alexander Thamm [at] acquires Birds on Mars (Berlin) • July 2026
The Munich Data and AI pioneer, still founder-led, adds the 35-person Berlin AI consultancy founded in 2018 by Florian Dohmann and Klaas Wilhelm Bollhoefer, strong in the public sector and in data culture work. The brand stays, and [at] moves to a group structure with more than 500 people across DACH and Croatia. In a market where BARC counts roughly a hundred data and analytics consultancies in DACH alone, critical mass now decides procurement shortlists. Expect more of this: the AI boutiques that defined the first wave are consolidating into the platforms that will deliver the second.
🇨🇭 Sequotech adds tiag as its tenth company (Zurich) • 14 July 2026
The Verium-backed Swiss group takes on Zurich SME provider tiag, where Alain Arnold took over from his father Claude in 2024. The group now counts nearly 400 experts across ten companies in Switzerland and Germany. tiag keeps its team and management, and management takes equity in the group. A textbook page from the succession playbook: generational handover solved, local identity kept, upside shared. Swiss SME IT is consolidating politely, one family company at a time.
☁️ Investcorp launches a software engineering platform around NetRom and Trivium • July 2026
Investcorp Technology Partners, majority owner of the Dutch-Romanian nearshore specialist NetRom with around 460 engineers since 2023 and primary investor in the German industrial AI firm Trivium with around 180 people since June, is combining both into one growth platform, with joint investment in AI-enabled propositions and further engineering firms to be added. Custom software plus AI-native delivery, designed as a platform from day one rather than integrated after the fact. Note the sequencing: the integration thesis comes before the next acquisition, not after it.
Also noteworthy: AXAITRA adds Switzerland’s Comitas to its European Microsoft AI group, bringing ISO 27001 grade governance for regulated clients (July) • BWK takes the majority of Munich SAP full-service provider CONSILIO in a succession solution • Maguar-backed NAVAX buys Berlin’s Kindermann TCV to deepen Dynamics 365 Business Central in Germany • Bregal-backed Netrics acquires the data consultancy Banian in Switzerland • EGS Beteiligungen of the Ernst Göhner Stiftung takes a stake in Swiss network specialist Netcloud, with the existing shareholders staying meaningfully invested (effective May 2026) • T&N takes over the Digital Solutions unit of CKW Gebäudetechnik, another clean Swiss carve-out • Photon Capital adds Levelfour, the third piece of its Dutch managed network and security platform • Ubitec and aicx combine into a single sovereign AI platform for the German public sector and Mittelstand • and in Austria, sigmavista, AQENTO and co-mind AI launch a private AI offering run entirely out of an Austrian data centre.
The Pattern I See
In one month, the buyer universe for European IT services became visibly wider: an Indian strategic at a 140 percent premium, a French industrial at nearly 100, Belgian and German private equity, a Swiss foundation, family capital. Two takeovers of listed companies in three weeks tell you public markets were underpricing these assets; the premiums tell you scarcity is real. And in almost every private deal this month, the founders stayed invested. Supply is increasingly succession-driven, demand is increasingly programmatic, and the capital in between has never been more varied. If you run a specialised, profitable IT services company, you are not looking for a buyer. You are choosing one.
On My Radar
What I Am Reading This Summer
Worth Reading
OMMAX, Ibexa and Make, The AI Trends Report 2026
250 European decision makers on AI maturity, scaling and governance. The number I keep quoting is in the essay above: 58 percent have a defined AI strategy, only 44 percent an operating model that can execute it. That gap is the IT services market for the next three years.
Subtitled “No more excuses”. AI as the majority of global venture value for the first time, Europe’s emerging category leaders, and a sharp chapter on the rise of the AI-native tech services firm. The best single overview I have read of where the capital is going.
Several of this month’s deals sit squarely in the segment Eike and I invest in, so here is the usual transparency note, with a half-year status. IT Capital Fund I is a DACH small-cap buyout fund: we acquire profitable IT services companies with 5 to 30 million euros of revenue and build them into European champions through operational excellence and programmatic Buy and Build. The playbook comes directly from scaling Cloudflight from 25 to 100 million euros of revenue and exiting at 400 million to Partners Group.
Half-year status: tecRacer, our AWS platform, has fully integrated its first add-on, KAWA commerce, with day one retention of one hundred percent. Further add-ons are in active discussion, and fundraising continues toward a Q4 2026 close.
IT Capital Fund I
DACH small-cap buyout · operator-led · fundraising toward a Q4 2026 close
If anything in this edition resonated, I would love to hear from you. Whether you are assembling a platform, weighing an offer, or simply want a second read on a buyer who has come knocking, my door is always open.
If you are building, integrating, or considering an exit in IT services, I have probably sat in a version of your seat already. Drop me a line.
