Expanding into the US remains a key ambition for many European growth businesses. With a large, dynamic market, the US offers significant opportunities - but also unique challenges. Drawing on the experiences of ECI portfolio companies, ECI’s North American Growth Specialist, Brett Pentz, shares his secrets to building a successful US growth strategy in 2026.
1. Consider acquisition versus organic carefully
The first question when considering your US route to market is whether to enter organically or via acquisition. Each path offers distinct advantages depending on your goals, capabilities, and timeline.
For example, leader in digital-first, tech-enabled marketing, Croud, initially pursued an organic strategy, relocating key business development and client leadership talent. This allowed them to build a US client base from scratch, leveraging existing UK systems and technology to deliver high-quality service. Over nearly a decade, this approach led to consistent growth, with a mix of UK clients with US presence and additional new US-headquartered logos. As the business matured, Croud shifted to an acquisitive strategy to deepen service offerings and expand into new talent and technology hubs. The acquisition of Vert Digital (now Croud Atlanta) in 2024 marked the beginning of this next phase.
Commify, by contrast, recognised early on that scale was essential to succeed in the US business messaging market. In 2024 they acquired Text Request, adding 10% to global revenues and significantly expanding their US footprint. The acquisition provided not only scale but also a strong operational base to drive future US growth.
2. Move people over - but do it with purpose
Relocating talent from the UK to the US can be a powerful way to embed company culture and accelerate learning. But it’s important to do so with a clear strategy. When MiQ was looking to expand in the US, Founder Gurman Hundal and his family moved over for four years, and that meant he could hire and train people the MiQ way and get a better first-hand understanding of the workings of the US market. Working in the weeds in the US, he saw, for example, the difference in US and UK sales cycles. Whereas US buyers might have more process such as RFPs, pitch decks, the people they wanted to meet etc, they were also more likely to commit and sign up for longer terms than their UK equivalents.
Croud executed a similar model, promoting senior business development manager Kris Tait to VP of Business Development and tasking him with launching the US office in New York. His UK experience helped establish best practices, while his time in the US enabled him to adapt to local client expectations. Kris was the first of many to make this move, and over time, a hybrid culture emerged - blending Croud’s UK strengths with US market nuances.
3. Consider your base carefully
There are some key determining factors when thinking about your ideal base in the US, such as where your ideal customer profiles are most concentrated, whether the location is within a tax-friendly environment, or if there is a strong local talent pool for recruitment. Choosing the right base of operations in the US can have a significant impact on long-term success. For Croud, New York was the right first base due to the prospective customer targets identified. Over time, they complemented this with acquisitions in lower-cost regions like Atlanta, enabling them to expand capabilities and access new talent pools while maintaining cultural alignment.
It’s also important to keep your end-customer front of mind. When Moneypenny opened its US HQ in Atlanta, it was identified as a popular area for its existing and potential client base in legal, finance and accounting, and healthcare. Other considerations included ease of access to the UK, with Atlanta a key international flight hub. Lastly, having opened in Charleston and then experienced significant hurricane-related disruptions, they were keen to ensure they had a HQ with minimal disruptions to their critical communication services. It is important to consider all possible criteria to prioritise the right launchpad in the US.
4. Team culture
Building a strong team in the US is about more than just hiring—it’s about creating a culture that blends local expectations with your company’s core values. When Peoplesafe acquired OK Alone in North America, CEO Naz Dossa noted that virtual meetings alone aren’t enough to foster strong relationships. Face-to-face interactions were key to building trust and smoothing leadership transitions, especially when managing remote teams. Across all these examples, it’s clear that success in the US depends on building a team that’s not only capable but culturally attuned and connected.
5. Commit for the long term
Perhaps the most important secret is this: success in the US takes time, investment, and commitment. It’s not a market where you can dip your toe in and expect immediate results.
All the companies we support with successful US growth strategies demonstrate the value of long-term thinking. Whether through sustained organic growth, strategic acquisitions, or a combination of both, they’ve shown that with the right strategy and team, European businesses can thrive in the US.
Insights
19/02/2026
Brett Pentz,
Isa Maidan
Read Time: 5 Min
The five secrets to a successful US growth strategy
Each month, we turn the spotlight on the leadership teams in our portfolio to find out what drives them, who inspires them, and the biggest lessons they’ve learned.
This month, we chat with Chris Newton-Smith, CEO of IO, a company changing how global businesses handle data privacy and information security compliance. Since joining IO last year, Chris has brought a proven track record in leading global technology businesses from roles at Boku, iRis Software Systems, and Redknee Solutions Inc.
Chris shares his greatest leadership lesson, what motivates him, and how he fosters innovation across multiple regions.
Q: What motivates you, and why is that a driver?
I’m motivated by building things that make a real difference for customers. Throughout my career, I’ve found that when you start with the customer’s challenges, you build the best businesses.
That motivation is amplified by our purpose at ISMS.online (or IO for short). We help organisations to improve their resilience through compliance and information security. Our customers are dealing with some of the biggest challenges in business today, from protecting data and managing cyber risk to navigating new regulations and emerging issues like AI governance. Helping them tackle those challenges successfully is what drives me every day.
Q: What are you most proud of in your career?
I’m most proud of the times I’ve helped teams achieve things they initially thought were impossible. Whether it was entering a new market, integrating an acquisition, or developing a new solution to meet a customer requirement, it’s about bringing people together around a clear goal and helping them to achieve it.
The opportunity at IO is one of the most exciting I’ve seen. Every organisation is facing growing pressure to prove that they can manage information securely and use AI technology responsibly. Our goal is to help thousands of organisations with the tools and services they need to build this trust with their customers, regulators, and partners.
Q: Which rule do you expect your employees to abide by?
Great teams are built on trust and transparency. This means being open about progress, challenges, and what support you need to succeed. I expect everyone at IO to speak up early, share information, and hold ourselves and each other accountable for what we’ve committed to.
This approach is even more important in our remote/hybrid work set-up, as we don’t see each other face-to-face every day. Clear communication is what helps to keep us connected and aligned. It ensures that we make effective decisions and that we deliver on our commitments to our customers.
Q: What has been the career lesson you've had to learn the hard way?
One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned is that getting strategy right takes time and that it often needs many more iterations than you expect. Strategy isn’t about a single decision. Instead, it’s a series of adjustments that you make as you learn more about your customers, market, and team.
Building success takes persistence. You need to test ideas and sometimes let go of good initiatives to make room for the best ones. The best strategy evolves through trying new ideas, learning from failures, and staying focused on your customers.
Q: Who inspires you?
I’m inspired by the people I work with at IO and their expertise in compliance. Our team really understands compliance and information security, from ISO standards and GDPR to emerging areas like AI governance. Our team is passionate about getting compliance right and I learn something new from them every day.
Q: What is IO's secret sauce that makes it so distinctive?
Our secret sauce is that we make meeting complex compliance and regulatory requirements achievable and sustainable. Most organisations know they need to meet standards like ISO 27001 or NIS2, but they lack the time, expertise, or structure to do it effectively. Our advantage is bringing together a great product with talented people and proven processes, in a market that often focuses only on the latest technology features.
Q: How do you switch off from work?
You’ll find me driving my daughter and son to sports fixtures around the country. My wife coaches junior netball teams, so our weekends and evenings are busy with everyone’s matches. My jobs include the driving, plus carrying kit, setting up gazebos, videoing matches, and generally cheering on the teams. Helping my children prepare and watching them handle the pressure on the pitch or court is really rewarding. I think I get more nervous on the sidelines than they are in the game!
Q: Favourite film?
I’d pick Moneyball – a great combination of baseball, mathematics, an underdog coming up with a winning strategy, and Michael Lewis.
Insights
19/02/2026
Read Time: Min
“In Focus” with IO CEO, Chris Newton-Smith
We’re delighted to announce our investment in Paragin Group, a leading provider of exam and assessment software solutions. The investment represents a full realisation for Main Capital Partners.
Paragin has developed from a domestic Dutch player to become the Benelux market leader, with a rapidly expanding international footprint. Located in the Netherlands, the company employs approximately 120 professionals representing more than 20 nationalities, who together serve a loyal and diverse customer base of approximately 1,250 end customers across 20+ countries in Europe and beyond.
Paragin delivers an integrated suite of software solutions that support high-stakes exam and assessment workflows across the entire learner lifecycle, serving a range of end-markets including vocational and higher education, exam institutions and commercial education providers. All solutions have at their core Paragin’s mission to empower learners and educators by providing learning solutions that are accessible to the broadest possible range of people, regardless of their needs, skills, characteristics, or background.
Paragin has completed three strategic acquisitions since 2021, and our investment will support the team in accelerating its next phase of international growth in a rapidly expanding digital exams and assessment software market.
ECI was advised on the transaction by Arma Partners and De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek.
News
17/02/2026
Read Time: 1 Min
ECI invests in leading provider of high stakes exam & assessment software, Paragin
We’re delighted to welcome Marijn Pangemanan as Investment Director and Scarlett Salamon as Investor Relations Analyst.
Marijn joins ECI Partners from private equity firm KLAR Partners, where he was an investment professional, building the firm’s UK and European footprint. His experience covers a range of subsectors with a focus on tech-enabled services and GRC. Marijn has held board roles across portfolio companies in the UK, Germany and Sweden. Earlier in his career, Marijn was an Associate at CD&R, and he began his career in investment banking at Credit Suisse.
A fluent speaker in English, Dutch and Norwegian, with proficiency in Spanish and German too, Marijn’s language skills and previous investment experience will be beneficial to management teams looking to grow into the European market.
Scarlett will be working in ECI’s Investor Relations Team alongside Jeremy Lytle, Investor Relations Partner, and Chris Mockford, Investor Relations Director. She was previously an Investment Banking Analyst in UBS’s Private Funds Group, where she advised institutional clients on fundraising across European private equity.
Investment Team
16/02/2026
Read Time: 1 Min
ECI strengthens team with two new appointments
ECI has today published its 2026 Impact Report, outlining progress made across our ESG priorities and setting out our objectives for the years ahead.
As a certified B Corp, we believe businesses should be a force for good, creating jobs, supporting economic progress, and making a positive impact for employees, customers, and communities. As part of our Certification, we commit to publicly sharing our ESG objectives and progress made across our goals.
We focus on the areas important to our stakeholders, from the ECI team to our investors, and where ECI often supports management teams to progress on ESG. These are decarbonisation, diversity and inclusion, employee engagement, cyber resilience and charity. Highlights from the past year include achieving 100% carbon data tracking across the portfolio, launching our charity partnership with the Wilderness Foundation and rolling out updated family and caregiving policies following feedback from our employee engagement survey.
Looking ahead, our 2026 objectives include agreeing alignment with a decarbonisation framework, supporting more of our portfolio to track their full footprint, and launching our Rising Stars programme to support diverse talent across the portfolio.
News
09/02/2026
Read Time: Min
ECI launch 2026 Impact Report
TOPICS:
ESG
We’re delighted to share the news that ECI-backed ISMS.online (IO), the company changing how global businesses handle data privacy and information security compliance, has announced the appointment of Simon Church as Chair.
Simon joins the business as ISMS.online continues to build on more than a decade of supporting organisations facing rising expectations around security, risk, and regulatory accountability. He brings more than 25 years of experience specialising in cyber security products, services, and solutions. His career has been spent building, operating, and scaling technology-led businesses internationally, often in environments where security, resilience, and trust are fundamental to commercial success.
Alongside his executive background, Simon has extensive experience at board and advisory level across cyber security, managed services, and enterprise software businesses. He has worked with organisations at different stages of maturity, helping to guide decisions around market expansion, go-to-market strategy, partnerships, and investment. This perspective is particularly relevant as IO continues to expand and support a broader range of organisations operating in increasingly complex regulatory environments.
Simon’s appointment as Chair further strengthens IO’s board at a pivotal moment, bringing additional experience and perspective to support the company’s long-term strategy as it continues to scale in the UK and internationally.
We look forward to working with Simon as the business continues to support organisations navigating increasingly complex security, risk, and compliance requirements, and as IO builds on its strong foundation to deliver continued growth and long-term value.
News
02/02/2026
Read Time: 1 Min
IO appoints Simon Church as Chair
Clinical trials have long been seen as complex, costly, and often slow. But, that perception is shifting. With changing tech-stacks, innovative pharma and life sciences businesses are now using their clinical operations as a driver of competitive advantage.
This has changed rapidly in the last few years as smarter data infrastructure, AI-native platforms, and innovators significantly reducing their time-to-market, have caused a market shift. Here are four trends reshaping the clinical trials landscape:
1. Data liquidity is the new battleground
The challenge is no longer data collection—it’s data flow. Expectations are very high, with sponsors wanting real-time access to data, regulators demanding richer and more diverse data, and patients expecting seamless digital engagement. At the 2025 EPA Conference in Amsterdam, we saw that regulators are looking at more Real World Evidence using data from patient registries, insurance claims and electronic health records both during and after trials.
This is driving demand for modular, API-first platforms that can integrate with electronic health records, eConsent tools, wearables and analytics engines—without locking sponsors into rigid workflows. The winners will be those who can orchestrate data across the trial ecosystem while maintaining compliance and control.
2. Decentralisation is evolving into hybrid intelligence
With more trials now happening outside of traditional trial sites, such through virtual consultations, direct-to-patient trial materials, the complexity of trial logistics has increased. Providers need to be able to manage this effectively, and they need to be able to intelligently blend digital and physical touchpoints. This requires platforms that can manage complex, multi-modal workflows—while maintaining a single source of truth for data and documentation.
We have seen this decentralisation of trials support improved engagement over the last decade, but there is still more potential to be achieved. New features such as patient preference modelling and adaptive logistics (i.e. automatically adjusting visit times or inventory management) are all supporting better trial retention.
3. AI is moving upstream—and getting smarter
When we discussed clinical trials technology only two years ago, we were looking at AI as effective for creating efficiencies in ‘data extraction and cleaning, data mapping, analysis, labelling, indexing…’ How much has changed in two years. Now it is being used for everything from simulating trial designs, predicting regulatory outcomes and generating synthetic control arms. These capabilities are reducing trial sizes, accelerating timelines and improving statistical power.
But the real innovation lies in how AI is being embedded across businesses. It is why meaningful solutions aren’t just helping clinical teams, but also regulatory, safety and commercial functions, and why the most important thing isn’t necessarily what the technology can do, but how simple it is for people to use.
4. Investment is flowing into the sector
Global investment in the pharma and healthtech sectors remains strong. In the first half of 2025, investment has continued to flow into companies building the next generation of clinical platforms, AI-native tools and regulatory automation.
Source: PitchBook Data, Inc., Q3 2025 Healthtech VC Trends.
While total $ invested is still down from a peak in 2021, the growth of companies at the seed level, hopefully indicates strong signs of growth for the future, with more emerging companies supporting on regulatory change and the product lifecycle. Clinical operations are no longer a back-office function - they are a growth engine - and the infrastructure that supports them is now a board-level priority.
Insights
26/01/2026
Toby Fitzherbert
Read Time: Min
Clinical trials: from operational burden to strategic engine
2025 was neither an exceptionally good or an exceptionally bad year for SMEs, with modest GDP growth and an ease in inflation, but with rising cost pressures and an increased need for tech investment. So, what will 2026 hold in store for SMEs?
Toby Fitzherbert looks at the five biggest challenges that SMEs are likely to face in 2026 and offers insights into how they can navigate to deliver growth over the next 12 months.
1. Pace of tech change and need to invest in AI
The new world of Gen AI poses both threats and opportunities for SMEs. For those who can adapt and adopt, there is a genuine opportunity to outperform Enterprise-scale competitors. Not only that, but AI allows an SME to scale efficiently without putting significant cost in their business.
However, that makes it sound easy. Foundation models are still evolving rapidly, it is difficult to know which tech will be outsourced vs owned by Microsoft, AI regulation is still uncertain, AI skills are in tight demand, and barriers are cultural as well as structural for all businesses. Many lean SMEs simply do not have the time or the budget to spend on working out the art of the possible.
For this reason, it’s imperative that SMEs find trusted partners in the AI space – consultants and tools that can facilitate the processes and agents required. It is important to remember that SMEs don’t need to deliver all AI solutions themselves, but they should increase expectations on their third-party providers. PSA tools like CMap or HR tech like Ciphr are adopting AI in their processes, so SMEs can benefit from the AI revolution without needing to build the automations themselves.
2. Cost pressures
Rising employment costs will still be the dominant challenge for SMEs in 2026. The Autumn budget created a storm of pressures with the National Living Wage rising again in April 2026 and younger worker rates climbing even faster, while Employer National Insurance thresholds stay frozen. The Employment Allowance uplift will help the smallest end of SMEs, but most will still feel the squeeze. The focus on leveraging tech to automate tasks rather than hiring additional heads will be key, as well as outsourcing. A good example of this is Moneypenny, which allows SMEs to outsource their customer communications by phone and via web chat. It’s also important to maximise the productivity of your people, for example, Ciphr, which allows businesses to automate everything from routine HR tasks to delivering targeted training programmes, helping businesses free up time, improve engagement, and create a more productive workforce.
3. Cyber security and data governance
As businesses accelerate digital adoption and AI opens the ‘surface area’ for cyber-attacks, risks for SMEs will continue to increase in 2026. Threat actors are sophisticated and are targeting smaller firms as they know many lack dedicated security teams. For SMEs, the challenge is balancing resilience with cost, but security must go beyond endpoint protection or employee training, to deliver active monitoring.
Managed IT partners like BCN can monitor 24/7 and test vulnerabilities, while platforms like isms.online simplify ISO 27001 implementation and governance workflows so that cyber is embedded into culture and infrastructure.
4. Go-to-market in an AI world
Buyers continue to expect hyper-personalised experiences, instant responses and seamless digital journeys. At the same time, AI-driven search is reshaping how people discover all businesses, and it is often unhelpful for SMEs who are seeing eroding performance from organic or paid marketing on Google. However, while those that are reliant on ppc to drive leads may find challenges ahead in 2026, more generally, the search landscape has broadened, which may create opportunities for businesses who adapt quickly to tactics such as GEO, LLM optimisation, and increased use of social search across the customer journey. The important thing is not to just watch your organic traffic falling but understand how to adapt to the new world of search.
5. Global macro uncertainty
It may feel like we’ve been predicting global macro uncertainty for a few years now, but, unfortunately, we haven’t yet been wrong. While 2026 should be more measured in terms of inflation and economic shocks, the world still feels very uncertain when it comes to shifting alliances, the what-next on tariffs and supply chain impacts caused by geopolitical instability and climate shocks.
For SMEs reliant on exports or imports, it is likely that there will still be significant disruption over the next 12 months. SMEs must plan for volatility, diversifying their suppliers and end markets, and build financial buffers in their businesses to withstand shocks.
Conclusion
Can SMEs deliver tech transformation while battling rising costs? SMEs who stay agile and adapt to the new world have a real opportunity ahead – especially if they can find partners who can support them to outpace their competitors.
Insights
20/01/2026
Toby Fitzherbert
Read Time: Min
5 biggest challenges for SMEs in 2026
TOPICS:
Toby Fitzherbert
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