Building international leaders in the mid-market

How do you select the companies in which you invest?

Our investment proposition is focused on certain sectors or sub-sectors and above all based on fundamental principles. We favour companies offering good growth visibility, high barriers to entry, recurring revenues, attractive unit economics and solid, sustainable returns on invested capital.

This rigorous approach has led us to invest frequently in B2B service companies, particularly in the software and database, healthcare and education sectors. These are the sectors that most often meet our requirements in terms of recurring revenue, resilience, predictability and scalability.

Due to our experience gained from numerous investments, we have developed real expertise in these sectors, which is recognised by our partners and the teams we support. The issues we encounter are often similar from one investment to another, which allows us to be particularly effective in convincing management teams and helping them to reach new milestones in their development.

Within these sectors, we seek to focus our origination efforts on as wide a geographical area as possible, which explains our presence with more than 100 professionals spread across Paris, London, New York and San Francisco to cover Europe and North America.

This international presence, supported by multicultural and locally connected teams, enables us to identify and seize opportunities on both sides of the Atlantic, while effectively supporting companies in their development. This global coverage gives us access to a wide range of opportunities and allows us to be extremely selective in our investment choices.

Our portfolio fully reflects this cross-border approach, with a significant proportion of our companies having an international footprint, with operations on both sides of the Atlantic or strong potential for global expansion.

Since the platform was created, we have realised 22 exits without any losses, generating an average multiple of 4.4x the money invested, illustrating the strength, relevance and consistency of our investment approach, as well as our ability to generate sustainable value within these sectors.

How does your membership of the Rothschild & Co group set you apart?

Our family roots and international infrastructure are major assets. The umbrella brand and the values of family entrepreneurship it conveys enable us to establish a relationship of trust with entrepreneurs and management teams, offering them long-term support, stability and access to a global network of more than 1,600 investment bankers.

Rothschild & Co is the leading investor in our funds, alongside the group’s management teams and senior staff, which guarantees that our interests are fully aligned with those of our clients.

What are your value creation levers?

Value creation efforts begin well before the investment is made. We identify high-potential companies through continuous market monitoring and our network of sector experts. This gives us privileged access to company executives, well ahead of the formal processes. This ability to engage in dialogue allows us to build relationships of trust with management teams, accelerate our understanding of strategic issues and position ourselves as a preferred partner.

This approach generates a flow of qualified and exclusive opportunities, often resulting from indepth work carried out over several months — or even years — before the investment.

Our goal is to then transform already strong companies into true leaders in their markets. Given the distinctive criteria of our model and our experience developed over more than 15 years in our targeted sectors, we have developed replicable value creation methodologies that are deployed carefully to promote sustainable growth.

To do this, we rely on a dedicated team, the Portfolio Operations Group (POG), which currently consists of 18 experienced specialists. This team works hand in hand with the investment teams to support the transformation of our portfolio companies and accelerate sustainable value creation within each company we support. The POG is involved in key areas such as product offering architecture, go-to-market strategies (i.e. marketing and sales resources), operational improvement, external growth, the integration of acquisition and the strengthening of organisations and management teams.

This structure enables us to quickly deploy tailored action plans that improve the economic performance of companies, while also enhancing their attractiveness and long-term value potential.

Can you give us a concrete example of an investment that illustrates this strategy?

A prime example is our investment in Softway Medical, a software publisher for healthcare institutions in France. We identified this company back in 2016, and when we acquired a stake in January 2020, Softway Medical was already a leader in the hospital and radiology sectors. We saw an opportunity to transform it into a champion of digital healthcare.

Our investment was based on several levers: a strong market position, high visibility on recurring and growing revenues and significant growth potential in the hospital sector, in its historical market of private institutions as well as public hospitals, regional hospital groups and university hospitals. We supported the company in its transition to a SaaS model², its international expansion (Belgium, Canada) and the creation of a business unit dedicated to clinical data. To support this strategic vision, the management team was ramped up and six targeted acquisitions were made.

As a result, between 2019 and 2024, Softway Medical recorded average annual growth of 22% in revenue and 36% in EBITDA.

This trajectory culminated in the signing of a sale agreement with Bain Capital in April 2025, valuing the company at well over €1 billion and generating a multiple of 5x the money invested by our FAPI III fund.

This is a perfect illustration of our ability to identify, transform, grow and sell high-potential assets.