News and Insights

Following a strong year for the ECI team, we have been shortlisted for three awards at the GP Bullhound Allstars Awards 2026. 

We are delighted to be nominated for Growth and Buyout Fund of the Year, alongside two individual nominations for Investor of the Year.

Daniel Bailey, has been nominated in recognition of his work in delivering the exit of Peoplesafe for a 2.7x return, and helping steer CSL into ECI's first continuation vehicle, which delivered a 3.5x return.

Rory Nath has been nominated for leading our first European platform deal, with our investment in Paragin Group, the Dutch HQ’d market leader in mission-critical assessment software

Investor Allstars, now in its 24th year, celebrates the founders, investors and companies driving innovation and growth across Europe's technology ecosystem. Often called the Oscars of the tech world, it brings the community together to recognise the people and firms behind the year's standout performances.

The last 12 months have been a busy and rewarding period for ECI, continuing our focus on backing high-growth, resilient businesses and supporting our portfolio companies to achieve their growth ambitions. To see the team recognised at a fund level, and to have two of our investors shortlisted individually, reflects both the calibre of the management teams we back and the hard work that goes on behind every deal.

Congratulations to Daniel and Rory, and to all the investors and entrepreneurs shortlisted this year.

See the full shortlist here.

Across five decades of mid-market investing, ECI has reviewed and commissioned commercial due diligence on thousands of transactions, on both sides of the table. Most deals have CDD, whether commissioned by the vendor, the buy side, or both. That means we’ve seen examples of where it genuinely builds not just investor conviction, but also real value for the company, and, sadly, many where it falls flat.

Lewis Bantin, Partner and Head of ECI's Commercial Team, explains how management teams can get more from CDD, across the investment lifecycle.

1. Treat CDD as a strategic lever, not just a validation step   

Good CDD should work in two steps. The first and essential part needs to establish foundations – size of market, trends, the full competitive set. The second step should build on this foundational layer – how does it relate to your business plan? Is that plan consistent with customer behaviour, the competitive landscape and your own performance?

Unlike financial DD, this isn’t (just) a rearview mirror exercise. It’s forward looking and open to debate. For that reason, the best CDD prompts discussion and helps set the strategic direction – not just validating trends. ECI’s Commercial Team gets involved in the deal so that the commercial insight developed during due diligence carries straight through into the post-deal strategy work with management. CDD should (in our view!) be genuinely strategic rather than confirmatory; the latter being shelved once the deal completes. The best CDD we have seen opens your eyes to new market opportunities, new lines of business – it's how we understood the scale of opportunity in IoT and led to us backing the founders at Wireless Logic!

2. Choosing the right provider: start early  

When selecting a CDD advisor, the most important thing isn’t the name on the door. It’s about the team who will be working with you. They should have spent years immersed in their sector, can talk knowledgeably about stronger and weaker performers as they genuinely know the competitor set, and therefore bring insight and pattern recognition, rather than a template.

Scale matters too, but mainly as it defines cost. There’s a real spread from the global and MBB strategy houses to the boutiques, and in some cases even sole specialists. The right solution is not always the cheapest, but you probably also don’t need a six-figure budget for a customer referencing project. Lean on your network here. Your corporate financier and/or investor will have worked on comparable projects and should be able to direct you to the relevant specialists and right size the pitch. The important thing is timing – you don’t want to be meeting providers as you go. Getting to know the right people in your sector well before a process starts means you’re choosing based on fit and insight, not availability.

3. Build the data foundations for CDD 

One of the delays that often happens during the CDD process is unstructured or missing data, with providers spending their time knitting together various sources and making assumptions, rather than being able to present a coherent picture at the start. Pipeline and conversion data is often an important part of this. Without a quarterly view of how the pipeline is moving, it’s genuinely difficult to predict what the next six to twelve months will look like. Churn is the other areas we tend to see businesses underinvest in data quality. Many companies capture a high level 30,000 ft reason as to why a customer left, often because a drop-down box gets completed by an account manager who understandably wants to move onto the next deal. Things you can set up early, such as recording and transcribing exit conversations, and asking directly whether it was budget, competition, product etc, gives you a better pattern to work with from the start. The same applies to customer referencing more broadly: it's most useful when it's a routine habit rather than something commissioned for the first time in the run-up to a sale. Research shows that management-curated references are unsurprisingly 30-40% more positive than independently sourced customers, so few investors will rely on it wholly. With that in mind, it’s better to have the time to understand and remedy any likely outputs from customer referencing, rather than trying to curate the answer.

4. Be honest about the plan, and don’t overplay your hand 

Management teams, and sometimes their investors, unsurprisingly take the view that a more ambitious plan can support a stronger valuation. But massaged figures or overselling as established strategy something that is no more than a twinkle in the eye, often end up with teams discussing why something isn’t right, rather than why it is – and that can actively hinder conviction. Even if overplaying your hand on AI capability or sales traction gets you through a hot process, it tends to catch up post-deal, ending up with a difficult first year and often a disappointed investor.

The best CDD providers will put you on the right side of the ambition line. Because they aren’t paid on completion, they’re often the most objective read a management team will get on how bullish their own plan really is. That’s why it’s best to treat time with them as a genuine conversation rather than a test to pass.

5. New frontier: AI and defensibility  

If you think about the classic Michael Porter Five Forces framework, that has shaped most of CDD thinking, barriers to disruption and substitution used to sit low on the list of diligence priorities. Technological change and AI now mean that it’s central. Management teams should expect to answer the defensibility question re AI-native entrants and should have a considered view. We cover this in more depth in: How are investors thinking about AI defensibility and opportunity.

We're delighted to welcome Jessica Johnston as Investment Manager and Kajivan Kanthasamy as Finance Manager, as we continue to invest in the ECI team as we deploy our latest Fund.

Jessica joins ECI's investment team from Raymond James, where she spent five years advising founders and PE sponsors across the UK and Europe, with deal experience across data services, software, and professional services. As Investment Manager, Jessica will focus on originating and executing new investments in resilient, growth businesses, and supporting management teams once they partner with ECI.

Kajivan joins ECI's finance team from Montagu Private Equity, where he spent six years in the finance team. He has experience in financial reporting and FCA regulatory filings, budgeting and forecasting, and implementing tech solutions. Kajivan trained as a Chartered Accountant with Forvis Mazars, working on audits for large and listed clients. At ECI, his remit spans both management and fund entities.

Many mid-market businesses still measure marketing success through impressions, website traffic, keyword rankings, and click-through rates. While these metrics still have their place, they are becoming less reliable indicators of whether your business is actually visible to your audience.

At our recent ECI Unlocked webinar, digital strategy consultancy OMMAX shared their expertise with our portfolio marketing leaders on how AI is reshaping the buyer journey. Their message was simple: "People don't want search engines anymore. They want answer engines."

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews… they are now sitting between your brand and your buyer. We look at the ways best in class marketing teams are adapting to the next era of discovery.

1. Understanding brand equity inside LLMs

Visibility within LLMs is now measurable. Tools like Croud's BrandCI can help businesses track:

Disruption – how much of your traffic could be at risk as Google's AI Overviews reduce clicks to traditional search results? New tools can track this, including brand sentiment (is the AI saying good, neutral or bad things about you?), presence (in what share of relevant searches do you get a mention?), citations (how often are LLMs linking to your site?), and disruption (how far Google's AI Overviews have already dented your existing SEO rankings).

Sentiment – is AI describing your brand positively, neutrally or negatively?

Presence – how often does your business appear in relevant AI-generated responses?

Citations – how frequently do LLMs direct users back to your website?

OMMAX has run around 250 of these assessments and found that many businesses appear in about 20–25% of relevant LLM answers. Strong brands can reach 80%, while some are sitting at 8%.  

For mid-market businesses, sentiment matters more than the numbers. As OMMAX put it: "The only thing worse than not being visible in LLMs is being visible with a negative brand sentiment." They shared a client example where, in response to almost every prompt about their brand, the LLM responded with something along the lines of: yes, they exist, but I wouldn't recommend working with them. The culprit? Comment sections on old YouTube videos the company had long forgotten about.  

2. Have you changed channel focus? 

The channels that matter for LLM visibility are not the same ones that drove SEO performance, and your team's channel mix should reflect that.

According to OMMAX, LinkedIn is the most cited domain within ChatGPT, and YouTube is the most cited domain within Gemini. Facebook, on the other hand, is largely unreadable by LLM crawlers. So if your marketing team is putting energy into channels that LLMs can't access, that effort isn't building the visibility that matters right now.  

Third-party content matters more than it used to. With the previous focus on SEO, a mention without a link-back counted for little. However LLMs work differently, they don't just crawl your website, they draw on press coverage, review sites, forum threads, and discussion boards. Earning mentions, even unlinked ones, across independent sources is now a core part of building what OMMAX calls ‘algorithmic brand equity’. 

Paid search deserves the same scrutiny. The view from some leaders is that PPC has been performing for Google rather than for its clients, with revenue up on price even as click volumes fall. If your team's reports show costs per click rising against declining volume, that's the shift playing out in your own numbers, and it strengthens the case for rebalancing spend towards the channels LLMs actually read."

The practical question for your team is, are they actively pursuing coverage, reviews, and presence on the platforms LLMs read? 

3. Has your content adapted?

This one might sting a little but since ChatGPT launched, the internet has been flooded with mediocre AI-generated content. The irony is that to be visible inside LLMs, you need content that stands out from all of that. As OMMAX said: "We don't just need to produce more content, we need to produce better content. Content that stands out from the clutter." 

If you've invested properly in SEO over the years, you have a head start here. LLMs have learned which brands carry real domain authority, and strong organic foundations feed directly into that. But authority alone doesn't win the answer. LLMs then look for another level of insight relevant to the specific question being asked, so content that was broad enough to rank on Google now needs to be developed further and personalised to the questions your buyers are actually asking.

But there's also a structural issue, not just a quality one. The ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Anthropic bots all behave very differently from Google's crawler, and they're considerably less mature. One OMMAX client's website was fully readable by Google, but the ChatGPT bot couldn't access the news section at all, meaning ChatGPT was completely blind to every update the company had ever published. Machine readability across all major crawlers is now a basic technical requirement, not an advanced consideration.

Key takeaways

Having a clear view on LLM performance and adapting channel and content strategy accordingly should be front of mind for all marketers at the moment. Marketing teams are really refocussing on the fundamentals. As OMMAX put it, "Building LLM visibility isn't about tricking an algorithm or finding growth hacks. It's about having a great product, communicating about it effectively, understanding which channels matter, and keeping your content hygiene in place."  

The good news is that when brands get it right, LLM referrals tend to lead to conversion rates seven to nine times higher than normal because users arrive already informed, looking to confirm a decision rather than gather information. The traffic is smaller in volume but dramatically higher in intent.