News and Insights

2025 was a year of continued evolution and momentum for ECI as we delivered two exits with an average 3.1x return, raised our first Continuation Fund, completed two investments and two portfolio bolt-on acquisitions, and saw double-digit revenue and EBITDA growth across the portfolio.

We completed two strategic investments in Insurance Insider and CSL alongside two portfolio company bolt-on acquisitions. CSL acquired EdgeConnect, a multi-award-winning internet connectivity solutions specialist, while IGG's acquisition of KGC Associates further strengthened its governance offering to clients.  

Portfolio companies delivered double-digit revenue and EBITDA growth in 2025, with international revenue now exceeding 50% of total revenue, representing 14% growth in the last 12 months. 2025 saw ECI hold two portfolio summits as part of its ECI Unlocked program, the Digital Growth Summit and Performance Summit, bringing together leadership teams to share insights and best practices. 

We welcomed five new team members: Georgia, Ben, Neal, Simona, and an upcoming joiner in Investor Relations. The year also gave us the opportunity to celebrate Ash Patel's 25 years with ECI and Philip Shuttleworth's upcoming retirement after 30 years with us. 

AI at ECI

ECI launched its AI Task Force (AITF) in 2025, a cross-functional committee providing centralised oversight for all AI-related activity across both ECI and delivering connectivity across the portfolio.

We also further enhanced our proprietary AI tool, Amplifind™, with the launch of Amplifind™360, to support our portfolio drive efficiency, visibility and collaboration across their M&A pipeline, and the launch of the Amplifind ™ Deep Research tool, transforming how we approach company analysis and market intelligence through AI agents across trusted sources.     

ESG at ECI

In 2025, ECI became an EDCI signatory to enhance the robustness and transparency of portfolio ESG data. We also worked with our portfolio to improve carbon tracking, with 100% of our existing portfolio (companies in portfolio over 12 months) now tracking carbon data, providing a foundation for us to help them with decarbonisation initiatives. In 2025, we selected Wilderness Foundation as our charity partner, an organisation that uses nature-based therapy and outdoor learning to help vulnerable young people build resilience and improve mental health.

We're delighted to announce the exit of Peoplesafe, a global provider of workforce safety software products and services for lone workers and at-risk workers, to Summa Equity, generating a return of 2.7x since we first invested in the company in 2018. 

Founded in 2001, Peoplesafe has more than 25 years of experience supporting employers and protecting lone and frontline workers in increasingly complex and hybrid work environments. It serves public and private sector customers across industry, healthcare, real estate, retail, utilities, and more.

Peoplesafe equips workers with real-time access to emergency support. Employees access the support through several integrated safety solutions including mobile apps, dedicated devices, and a 24/7 in-house Alarm Receiving Centre (ARC). These are all connected through Peoplesafe’s own software platforms, Nexus and Lighthouse. Over the past year, the company launched Travelsafe, a safety travel app for employees, and Apple Crash Detection to protect employees during work-related travel. They also introduced Roamsafe, so that employees can maintain connectivity even in low-signal areas. This has also supported AI features being launched by the business, including Alarm Intelligence, which seeks to expedite response and enhance health and safety reporting by summarising complex technical incident logs into digestible summaries. Increasingly, Peoplesafe also integrates directly into organisations HCM and workforce management platforms.

Advisors:
Baird: Corporate Finance
Squire Patton Boggs: Legal
PwC Strategy &: Commercial Due Diligence
PwC: Financial Due Diligence
Crosslake: Technology Due Diligence
Capstone: Regulatory Due Diligence
Liberty Corporate Finance: Management Advisory

At ECI, we’ve met 1000s of CEOs and Founders and have partnered with over 250 of them. In that time, there are traits that we’ve seen which tend to be indicators of a successful partnership. These aren’t the sort of checklists you’ll see in management DD, but from our experience, these are common traits that we look for in the people we back.  

1. Integrity and honesty

Transparency is a non-negotiable in business, and the most likely indicator that a partnership will fail is when trust breaks down.  

CEOs might fear sharing bad news with their investor, but they really shouldn’t. We know from our experience that it’s a very rare investment that has a straight-line trajectory – we’re backing growth, and that can mean growing pains! The priority is that we solve problems together with the teams we’re working with – part of our role as a supportive investor is to help you navigate challenges.  

We’re putting millions of pounds (of our investors' capital) in the trust that a leader is telling us the truth, and that we can trust them to deliver what they say. That means we need to have faith in their integrity to justify that conviction. When we interview CEOs about what is important to them, we often see this sentiment reflected back to us. They need to trust people in their team, and they need to trust their investor to back them and their plan. It’s the bedrock of successful growth.  

2. Quietly ambitious  

It will be unsurprising that ambition is a must-have for CEOs and Founders, but one thing that might surprise people who don’t work in business is that it probably looks different to how you expect. We rarely see the bell-ringing, self-congratulatory, champagne and personal brand-building type of ambition. Instead, while CEOs might like to celebrate milestones, a common trait we see is that as soon as a milestone is hit, they’re asking, “What’s next?”  

This is important, as often when we invest, CEOs become millionaires overnight. The type of people we back tend to immediately refocus on how they can go on to double the size of their business, rather than taking their eye off the ball. It’s the vision of what you can achieve that is exciting. When we interviewed John-Paul Savant, CEO of ATG, about what motivates him, he said, “The motivation is building something that encompasses the fullness of what I envisage and turning it into a reality.”  

3. Empowering leadership  

Micromanagers rarely scale – empowering others is key to growth. This is something we see time and time again: the best leaders focus on finding people they can trust and allowing them to deliver. As an investor, this is super important, as if you’re in the weeds, it’s very hard to keep an eye on the more strategic parts of the role. But also, an empowering leader has a laser-like focus on the best talent, and that means we know they are going to build a team with exceptional people.  

When we talked with Jesper With-Fogstrup, Group CEO at Moneypenny, at our recent ECI Unlocked Digital Growth Summit about the role of leadership in technological change, he described his role as CEO as a ‘Chief Unblocking Officer’. His role is to understand where there are roadblocks in the business and clear the path for individuals to deliver.   

4. Curiosity and breadth of thinking 

At ECI, we always like to spend time with leaders ahead of a deal, to really get to know them. These one-to-one conversations are more revealing as to what motivates them as CEO – it’s often family, a wider purpose, certain goals they’re keen to achieve.  

These conversations also reveal something else – the types of questions they ask. And what we often see is an innate curiosity, whether that’s in our motivations, in tech change, in how industries are transforming, in other leaders and how they’ve delivered their own goals.  

Mark Eastham, CEO of Avantia, puts this best when he says, “I believe a good leader is someone who asks the right questions rather than always having the right answers. It’s through curiosity and challenging assumptions that you drive progress and empower your team to find solutions.”  

5. Decisiveness 

Perfect decisions don’t exist. In fast-growth businesses, operating in a fast-evolving sector in a technologically changing world, waiting for the perfect decision can cost you.

The worst outcome? Leaders who feel like they need endless analysis to justify the route forward – this can lead to internal paralysis while competitors move ahead. On the other end of the spectrum, a leader who solely bases decisions on gut instinct is likely to fall foul of too many bad decisions, but strong CEOs balance data obsession with the confidence to cut through the noise and set a clear direction.

Stephen Roberts recently attended Unleash World 2025, the leading global HR tech conference exploring how AI is transforming talent, learning, and organisational design. The theme of the conference chimes with what we see in our own portfolio, including HR tech platforms, Ciphr and CMap:  AI is reshaping the requirements of an HR function, as well as the expectations of the providers that serve it. 

1. AI is first and foremost a people issue

AI is first and foremost a people issue, with businesses rapidly changing in terms of team size, shape, makeup and training needs – all placing a new set of demands on the HR function.  

What CEOs want from the Chief People Officer is changing. CEOs are looking to reskill the talent they already have, hire the talent they need, and add AI assistants and agents to workflows wherever they can. HR needs to play a role in that. Change management, and specifically bringing people with you through the transition to AI, will become one of the key roles of HR.   

2. The expectations of the workforce are changing 

Alongside changing demands from CEOs, there are also rapidly changing expectations in the workforce, particularly in terms of UI/UX. Employees are increasingly used to the conversational interfaces of LLMs and don’t want to be playing ’whack-a-mole’ between multiple internal applications to perform tasks or gain insights. In time, all those systems will work together, with an orchestration layer connecting everything, and a reasoning layer making sense of the data to help employees get answers or complete tasks. So instead of logging into five tools, you’ll just ask one system, and it will handle the rest. 

To work effectively, AI needs to provide insights grounded in accurate and compliant data. The fundamental requirement for a system of record isn’t diminishing. However, the employee is increasingly used to interacting with AI – there will be lots of shadow AI already in most businesses. If the HR team don’t deliver what they expect (and by extension, if existing HR tech doesn’t keep up with the expectations of the end user), then there will be wedge threats from new tools being used further down the business. If offerings aren’t augmented with AI (and automation in the case of payroll) then they will quickly become antiquated. 

3. A hot market for AI-first HR tech startups, and lots of M&A… 

In that context of reshaped requirements of HR, there have been vast amounts of VC money coming into parts of the HR tech stack, particularly into talent acquisition. The vast majority of these products are niche and are augmenting an existing process - making HR functions more efficient, but not necessarily transforming them (yet). Examples would be AI-driven CV screening or job description generation. The most interesting businesses are those that are creating new business models altogether – things that can’t be done by humans. There are fewer of these, but they are coming.  

Whilst some of these businesses have incredible products, few have the customer base or trusted market positions of the incumbents. It therefore feels likely that M&A will be a theme of the coming years in HR tech, as incumbents buy rather than build more AI capability. These businesses are typically the system of record and/or payroll providers, and are sitting on significant amounts of cash, so acquiring AI sparkle to sell into their huge bases is an obvious augmentation of their growth strategies. 

Indeed, it has already been an active period as businesses like Workday (Sana and Paradox) and SAP (Smart Recruiters) acquire.  

4. Implications of AI on HR tech business models 

The talk amongst vendors at Unleash was the impact on the broader business models – marketing, sales, customer success and service.   

The attitude of the leadership team is crucial in this regard. AI is evolving rapidly, and the technology is improving quickly. This increases the speed of new ways of working and new business models emerging. The best teams will demonstrate humility, make it clear internally and externally that they don’t know everything, but there will be significant change to come, the business is starting from a strong position and has inherent competitive advantages but is going to need to learn and adapt in order to maintain that. Job transformation is inevitable but that creates new opportunities.  

Incumbent HR tech providers need to emphasise the advantages they hold - the data they sit on, the domain experience (in product and go to market), scale, brand and longevity. Buyers will generally favour buying from trusted vendors, provided they are maintaining a competitive product.  

For those that do adapt, AI should be seen as a massive opportunity, both in terms of revenue growth but also in reshaping businesses. Agentic AI should extend the remit of HR tech (and by extension the addressable market for businesses), creating stickier customers, driving more value out of their HR software. Failure to adapt will see the system of record becoming infrastructure, with the ‘action’ happening on top if it – the equivalent of the copper cables that the internet start-ups were built on top of. This is an exciting moment for HR tech firms rising to that challenge for their customers.