News and Insights

Tomorrow, Christopher Nolan's much-anticipated retelling of the Odyssey arrives in cinemas, and one of the oldest stories we have will meet a new generation. It is a story I know well. Long before I joined ECI's Commercial Team, I studied Classics, and while we tend to remember the monsters and storms, beneath the spectacle, it is a study of resilience, the tale of one leader trying to make it home against immortal will and mortal temptation.

In our 50th year, having backed more than 250 businesses, the theme of resilience continues to feel close to home. Growth is rarely a straight line. The companies that have the most successful stories are rarely the ones that dodged every storm, but those that pulled through despite the odds and were stronger for it. Here are five key concepts from the epic tale of Odysseus and what they might teach us about building businesses that last.

1. Nostos (Homecoming): Never lose sight of the mission   

Everything Odysseus does bends towards one fixed point: Ithaca and getting home. The landscape might change, but the destination stays the same. CEOs will recognise this - markets shift, and strategies change, but the core reason a business exists, its "why", is what keeps it steady when everything else is in motion. Bionic is a good example of this. When we backed it, the mission was simple: help Britain's small businesses get a better deal. Almost everything else was reinvented, as a telephone-based energy broker became a multi-product digital marketplace across energy, insurance and finance. We also see this in the Tech for Good businesses we back – not only does the mission drive the strategy, but it also motivates employees and helps them retain top talent. For example, Peoplesafe’s focus on worker safety across their products - whether that was on their commute, when working remotely or in lone worker situations. Know your Ithaca, and keep sight of it even when things change around you.

2. Metis (Cunning): Strategy beats resources   

Christopher Nolan described Odysseus as "an amazing strategist and a very wily person", and the Odyssey is careful about the kind of intelligence it admires. Homer’s Odysseus is not “sophos”, learned or wise. He is “polymetis”, a man of many wiles: resourceful, quick, able to solve the problem in front of him with whatever is to hand. That distinction travels well into business. The strongest companies are not always the ones with the most capital or the biggest teams, but those able to think on their feet and problem-solve quickly. We see this in many of the companies we’ve backed, where they face much larger incumbents. It isn’t likely you will be able to outspend such a rival; however, you can out-think them, focussing relentlessly on a particular target customer, or building a better service that services a need ignored by larger competitors. They are the ones who make better choices and use the tools they have more cleverly. Auction Technology Group is a good example. Rather than pushing more spend into the traditional auction world, where it had its origins, it backed a simple but powerful insight: that the future of auctions was online and data-led. It built the marketplaces and the technology to match, turned a smart idea into a category-defining platform, and in 2021, we took it public on the London Stock Exchange, realising our remaining shareholding in 2024, generating a 4.4x return.

3. Atē (Folly): Don’t be tempted by the easy route 

The Lotus-Eaters, Circe, Calypso and the Sirens all try to pull Odysseus off course, and the danger is not always obvious. The Sirens sing the sweetest song of all. In business, the Sirens are the easy answers, and success often depends on saying no more than yes, and on interrogating what looks attractive rather than taking it at face value. One of our investments, Avantia, does this very deliberately through OKRs, the objectives-and-key-results framework popularised by Google. It sets three a quarter, and leaders from across the business have to debate and agree on the top priorities that make the cut. Its CTO, Dan Huddart, has said that implementing OKRs forces you to prioritise, which requires commitment but can be hugely valuable. That discipline keeps a whole organisation pulling in one direction, rather than chasing every passing opportunity. Knowing what to say no to is as valuable as knowing what to say yes to. Another area where this is common is M&A; deciding which acquisitions not to do is often just as important as the ones you do acquire. Duncan Painter, the Founder of ClarityBlue who went on to pursue c.30 acquisitions at Ascential plc before joining ATG, put this succinctly: “It’s not something we would want to do too often, but we have pulled out of a couple of deals where we’d spent six to nine months on them, on the last night. We don’t see that as a failure. We see that as making the right choices.”

4. Homophrosunē (Like-mindedness): Build the team that stays the course  

Odysseus gets home in part because the people who matter stay loyal: Penelope, Telemachus, even his old dog Argos. Long-term success depends on that kind of trust, because culture is what drives commitment. But the Odyssey tells a subtler story about teams too. Most of Odysseus's crew never makes it home. Some are reckless and do not listen. Others are lost precisely because he does not trust them: they open the bag of winds because they have no idea what is inside, and he keeps the danger of Scylla to himself. Trust, in other words, runs both ways, and a more open or trusting Odysseus might well have reached Ithaca sooner. The best businesses understand this. At MiQ, they described this two-way communication as radical transparency, creating an open and inclusive culture became a genuine driver of growth. Mark Eastham, CEO of Avantia, puts it well when he says a good leader is one who asks the right questions rather than always having the right answers. Teams that trust each other and leaders who are open with them tend to go further and faster.

5. Moira (Fate): Control what you can  

Storms, gods and sheer luck shape Odysseus's voyage. Poseidon sends the waves, and no amount of seamanship stops them. Leaders face the same truth. You cannot control interest rates, geopolitics or regulation, but you can control your culture, your strategy, your talent and your execution. Tusker is a clear illustration. It couldn’t control changes to BIK tax rates, interest rates, used-car residual values or a pandemic-hit car market. What it could control was its response: the decisive pivot to electric vehicles, the strengthening of its leadership team and the rebuilding of its technology. It was those controllable choices, not the weather, that carried it through to a sale to Lloyds Banking Group. When the storm comes, and it always does, the businesses that endure are the ones that pour their energy into what they can change.

“Guilty until proven human.” That was the title of a session at this year’s e-Assessment Association conference in London, and it captured the anxiety being felt in the testing and exam industry. AI is not only being built into authoring, marking and proctoring, the same tech is now in every candidate’s pocket, threatening exam integrity. A week later I was sitting on a panel at EdTechX, where investors were circling the same problem from the other side: with AI changing everything, which of these businesses is backable?

Following our recent investment in Paragin Group, the Benelux market leader in high-stakes exams and assessment software, my two conferences in a fortnight among their peers, buyers and regulators sharpened my conviction about where the value in the market will sit.

1. Innovation needs depth   

At the conferences, every vendor is demoing the same features: AI that drafts questions, AI that grades them, and AI that flags suspicious behaviour. Most of it is a thin layer over the same large language models that anyone can license. If your product is just veneer on a model your competitor can call tomorrow, that’s not sustainable differentiation.

The businesses that stood out did the opposite to this. One UK-based provider, Risr, had trained its AI on deep, privileged medical training content in partnership with RCGP. Together, they developed an AI patient with an optional AI coach to help trainee GPs through simulated patient consultations to prepare for their final practical exams, something a general-purpose model cannot replicate without the underlying case bank. On my panel, this was the overarching theme - AI is an advantage where it sits on vertical depth, e.g. proprietary content or genuine domain expertise, where you know your customers’ workflows better than your competition. That last 10% of depth in customer knowledge is what impressed us most about the Paragin team. It leads to genuine innovation that can’t just be reskinned. Paragin has built out the most complete solution set on the market; AI can help us deliver on our roadmap more quickly, but it is human expertise that gives the edge on its direction.

2. Integrity has to be the sell  

Strip away the technology, and what an awarding body actually sells is confidence that a grade means what it says. England’s exams regulator, Ofqual, was unambiguous at the conference: its priority is trust in qualifications, technology comes second, and there are no guinea pigs when 800,000 students sit a GCSE on the same morning.

That is why the market will be conservative on AI adoption, and why owning the narrative on security and fairness is more important than features. This is also why outsiders underestimate the ease of disruption. You are selling to cautious buyers to whom brand trust is everything; it’s much more than just the hassle of changing systems. It’s much easier for an AI-native challenger to copy a feature than it is to displace loyalty, and that caution by buyers protects market incumbents who have an earned reputation.

3. Security and fairness are designed in

High-stakes testing is, at its core, a business built on trust with people’s most sensitive data. A set of results can decide whether someone qualifies as a doctor, an accountant or an engineer, so security, data protection and fairness have to be designed into the technology from the outset. Regulation is now formalising this, and under the EU AI Act, AI used to evaluate learning or to monitor candidates during a test is explicitly classed as high-risk, which carries real obligations around documentation, human oversight and demonstrable fairness. The recent move of that deadline from August 2026 to 2 December 2027 under the Digital Omnibus package changes the timing, not the direction of travel, and similar expectations are forming well beyond the EU’s borders.

For an investor, this is where track record and scale count. Building security and fairness into an assessment platform and being able to prove it is the work of years. Paragin has spent over twenty years wrestling with exactly these questions while continuing to innovate, and it has the scale to treat compliance and security as core to the product rather than a tax on growth. That hard-won experience, plus the resource capability to meet increased regulations, is difficult for a challenger to replicate.

For Paragin, this creates M&A and growth opportunities - as the bar on security and compliance keeps rising, many capable but sub-scale assessment businesses will struggle to clear it alone, and a platform that already takes these things seriously becomes the natural home for them to join. We can be a trusted and mission-aligned custodian of acquired businesses, with the scale to invest in leading edge group roles, like our newly appointed Cyber Security Engineer.

The sharpest test I heard in two weeks was the one put to our panel: can a business explain why it will still need to exist once AI is everywhere? In e-assessment, the answer, in my view, is that the winners over the next three to five years will be the ones that treat integrity and compliance as the point of the exercise rather than the price of it, because that is exactly what AI cannot commoditise.

Identity verification has been the core of cybersecurity with one assumed truth: verify identity at the point of entry, then trust the session. The new wave of AI has weakened this faith, operating at machine speed to mimic behaviour and bypass controls, meaning identity must be continuously monitored and re-verified. With multi-step AI-assisted attacks rising 180% year-on-year in 2025 according to the World Economic Forum, this is something we see leaders in the cyber space reacting to quickly.

1. Continuous verification in Zero Trust architectures 

Rather than assuming trust persists after authentication, Zero Trust architecture rejects the traditional “castle-and-moat” model of securing the perimeter and trusting everything inside it. Instead, it divides an organisation’s IT infrastructure into smaller, independently protected segments, each with its own verification requirements. This means that even if an attacker compromises one set of credentials, they face new authentication barriers at every boundary. Strong identity verification at entry remains important, but the main change is how the blast radius of compromised credentials is significantly reduced.

Compromised credentials are one of the most common causes of a breach. IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report shows breaches linked to stolen credentials cost an average $4.81m and take over 290 days to detect and contain. They also stated that 93% of organisations experienced 2 or more identity-related breaches in the past year, highlighting the severity of the threat.

2. Widening attack surface  

As organisations use more applications, operate increasingly in the cloud, and work remotely across multiple devices, the ways that their employees can be targeted are multiplying. AI is accelerating this by improving the quality of targeting through deepfakes and hyper-personalised phishing attacks, which make social engineering attacks more convincing than ever. Humans are a massive risk, which is why limiting devices and upskilling people through training and phishing simulations remains essential.

But alongside this, a second and distinct attack surface is emerging: the non-human one. AI agents can now autonomously identify what to access, determine the optimal moment to do so, and chain actions across systems without any human in the loop. This is very different from the risk profile of automation scripts in the past. As these agents act across customers' environments, cyber suppliers will increasingly be judged not just on whether an identity was verified at the start, but on whether loss of control was managed throughout: whether access was appropriately decayed over time, whether privileges were narrowed as risk increased, and whether the system could intervene mid-execution. Both perimeters are expanding simultaneously.

3. The next wave of identity shocks

Now, whether you believe that Mythos is as dangerous as Anthropic has outlined, or if it's just a clever marketing ploy, it is clear that as AI models get more sophisticated, so will the imminent danger to any cyber vulnerabilities. Bain characterises Mythos as a 'signal rather than the threat itself', which will expose under-investment in foundational cyber controls. A clear risk is how organisations govern the identity and access of their own AI agents. As businesses deploy copilots and autonomous agents across their operations, those agents need to be subject to the same identity verification and access controls as the people they work alongside. An agent that can access payroll data, financial records, or sensitive customer information when the human equivalent would be denied that access entirely — represents a significant governance gap. If not architected correctly, your own tooling can become a source of vulnerability.

This risk is compounded by an accelerating asymmetry in how attacks are developed and deployed. AI is enabling attackers to release malware at a scale and speed that was previously impossible, with little need for quality control. Cyber attackers have the privilege of pushing beta versions and seeing what works to iterate rapidly, while defenders need to rigorously test and ensure the solution can work across complex interconnected systems. AI widens this gap further, which is why any improvement in model capabilities further expands the exposure of vulnerabilities. There is an arms race underway, and those not investing in the foundational controls now risk being left behind.

Move beyond Mythos or any other next-gen model, and on the horizon is quantum computing. While it’s likely a decade away, companies are already adopting encryption algorithms that can withstand the onslaught of a quantum attack. In fact, Europe has already set a 2035 deadline for removing quantum-vulnerable cryptography, with some governments targeting 2030 for sensitive systems. While 2035 may feel like a long time away, there is growing concern around cyber attackers adopting a "harvest now, decrypt later" approach to collect encrypted data now, betting on future technology to decrypt and use it in attacks, meaning companies need to identify higher-risk encrypted data now and move to protect it ahead of time.

ECI Partners is marking its 50th anniversary in June 2026. Founded in 1976, when there were fewer than ten private equity firms operating in the UK, ECI has grown to become one of the longest-established names in the industry.

Over five decades, ECI's approach has been built on a disciplined investment strategy, a succession model designed for longevity, and a consistent track record of being first to identify origination and value creation opportunities.

As the industry enters a new phase shaped by AI, ECI continues to invest in the capabilities it offers management teams, in its origination and deal-winning capacity, and in the results it delivers for investors.

ECI at 50: The transcript

Tom Wrenn: Building successful businesses for 50 years. What's not to like about that?

Chris Watt: 50 years of ECI, I thought it would be good to get together as you know the four current Managing Partners in the business to reflect on the 50 years that we've had, what's made ECI the business that it is over that time and what we're excited about for the next 50 years.

David Ewing: 1976 was a long time ago, and it's a fantastic achievement.

Tom Wrenn: I feel like I've been doing this for some time and yet ECI was founded before I was even born.

Ken Landsberg: So I joined ECI in 1984, which was just eight years after it had been formed. The opportunities were sourced in a somewhat disorganised manner. Some were from phone calls from the street for the automatic bed making machine or the flying car. Seriously.

Tom Wrenn: When you think of the 50 years we've been around, we were founded before personal computing even existed. The iPhone was only 2007.

In the context of the 50 years ECI's been around, is phenomenal to think how the world has changed. You can't survive in private equity for 50 years by doing what everyone else does.
You've got to innovate, you've got to evolve, you've got to think ahead of what other people are doing and I think that's why we've been in business for so long.

George Moss: Many of our LPs date back to the 90s, and actually having investors who've backed us through multiple funds over several decades does give us a sort of sure footing.

Building our succession model

Sean Whelan: I've always felt that ECI's succession model really makes us stand out in the private equity industry. When did it all start?

Ken Landsberg: It was around 1990. We had one Managing Director, Tony Lorenz, and the team felt, in a sense, there was too much risk you know in one person. The Managing Director functions were spread amongst 3-4 people.

Chris Watt: There's four of us typically Managing Partners at any point, and we will make typically one change to that group each fund cycle. It means there's no single individual that is running the business, it's a collaborative enterprise. It works very well for us, and it's something that we've evolved over the years, and I think adds great strength and resilience to the business.

David Ewing: It is going to be owned by other people in the future and our job is to hand over that shirt in a better place than it was when we inherited it.

Building the commercial team

David Ewing: We do have the largest single strategy team in the UK. You know we've got a big team of people and we've been doing this for a long time. You know 50 years.

Sean Whelan: What we found was that great management teams have a lot of ideas but they don't often have the capability or luxury of having people sitting around that can actually take some of those ideas and turn them into a plan and execute on them. We decided to have some internal resource that we call our commercial team that would help those management teams.

Lewis Bantin: We were actually the first private equity firm to set up a dedicated value creation team here in the mid market in the UK and it's all about starting in the commercial diligence when we make an investment carrying that commercial insight into post deal when we're working with the team to help them grow their business. And that means we move faster, we build relationships quicker, we deliver faster and ultimately that should drive and has proven to drive better outcomes for investors.

Sean Whelan: So when I look back at my career at ECI I've always been very proud of what the commercial team has achieved.

Lewis Bantin: It was a critical design choice that we made all those moons ago and it's helped in a number of ways. It's helped us to win the best deals, it's helped us at times to say no to deals that we shouldn't do. We're now able to draw on five or six different points of specialist expertise as and when the companies need them.

Building the origination team

Suzanne Pike: To win in today's markets you need to get many relationships right. That might be management teams, founders,advisors, subsector experts and you need to make the best of your data and that has always been a real strength of ECI's.

We first implemented a CRM system over 35 years ago that had firm wide adoption and I think that's before many other private equity firms even came into existence.We know which businesses we want to back. We build the relationships around those really early. We used to wait for a business to come to market before meeting the management team now on average we are meeting those teams four and a half years ahead of a transaction.

Ken Landsberg: The origination team is a professionalisation of our investment sourcing. It's systemised, it's data-driven and now it's AI-driven as well.

Suzanne Pike: We began with machine learning and then we've continued to evolve to adopt deep research and Agentic systems and the new advancements in AI. We have the best AI origination platform in the market: Amplifind™. Once we saw the benefit of Amplifind™ in our own business, we wanted to make sure that the portfolio had access to that as well so we launched Amplifind™360. We are the only private equity firm in the mid market to offer a solution like Amplifind™ to our portfolio companies.

Chris Watt: Looking back on our track record that we've built over the years, it's something that we're really proud of here at ECI. Five of the last seven funds that we've had have delivered a net return of either 2x money or 20% IRR or better. That's a fantastic consistent track record that we built there.

David Ewing: We're here to build successful businesses, I mean that's our kind of strap line that we've had since you know 50 years ago.

Building an exceptional team

Lewis Bantin: The team makes all the difference at ECI. We have an exceptional team of real talent,
real depth, from a real diversity of backgrounds, all working together to deliver great outcomes for our investors.

Keith Landsberg: One can't overlook the team that's been built and many of the people in this company have been here for decades.

George Moss: That does feed into the heart of our culture I think and actually those long term relationships we have internally within the firm are a key part of that.

Chris Watt: I think it's telling that the the longest serving employee we have at ECI is Brenda, our receptionist who's infamous around the industry for the warm welcome that everybody receives when they walk through the door. I think it says a lot about the firm, that our longest serving employee is in fact our front-of-house person.

David Ewing: We think very carefully about our values at ECI. You know we are ambitious, and we're considered, and we're collaborative.

Tom Wrenn: We've always had a great collaborative spirit at ECI, and that's why I think we've endured for so long. The sum of the parts is way more than each individual person brings to the business.

Building another 50 years

Chris Watt: I'm looking forward to the next 50 years. There'll be plenty of challenges and opportunities available to us. Even looking back on just the last 12 months, we've raised our first continuation vehicle, we've also backed our first European platform deal, and that's what makes it so exciting being here. There's always the next chance, the next opportunity to look forward to.

David Ewing: Let's look forward to in 50 further years time there will be four other people sitting around this table.

Tom Wrenn: When I think about the next 50 years, what gets me excited is what's the next great business we are going to back, who's that next management team, founder, CEO that we're going to partner with. Businesses like CarTrawler, Wireless Logic, MiQ, the current portfolio that we've got that's doing great things. That's what makes us all excited about what we do and that's why we hope to be here for many years to come.