Insights

Oakley Capital: Supporting Founders to Scale Their Business

Oakley Capital

22.07.25

Unicorns are no longer rare in Europe, but building a €1 billion+ business remains a major achievement. Oakley has a strong track record of helping ambitious founders and management teams scale at critical inflection points and create strategic value that attracts investors.

Often, the founders we back are product-focused - committed to building the best possible offering and serving customers. Many grow successful businesses on this basis alone. Oakley’s value lies in the next phase: working empathetically with founders to help them establish the structures, systems, and governance needed to support long-term growth and meet the standards of large-cap investors.

News Business Services

Oakley Capital agrees sale of legaltech platform vLex to Clio at $1bln valuation 30.06.25

We achieved this most recently with vLex, which began as a Spanish legaltech start-up before expanding into the US. We recently announced the sale of the business in a deal valuing vLex at $1 billion.

Below, we highlight the strategies that have driven success across our portfolio, including companies where we have increased the value often ten-fold or more, in certain cases to €2 billion plus today.

IU Group: Strengthening Leadership to Support Growth

In 2017, Oakley partnered with education entrepreneur Sven Schütt to accelerate growth at IU Group, a fast-growing online university. Since then, IU has increased enrolments tenfold to 140,000, becoming Germany’s largest and fastest-growing university.

Oakley helped scale operations by quickly building out the C-suite, leveraging our network to recruit a CFO that could support future growth and the founder’s strategic plans. Oakley also supported significant investment in IU’s tech platform to sustain growth in enrolments and higher demand for e-learning as well as the development of IU’s AI-powered teaching assistant. Meanwhile the development of a best-in-class financial reporting system has empowered the team to better target resources and plan future investments, including M&A.

Demonstrating Oakley’s commitment to backing founders over the long term, in 2023, we extended our partnership with IU, bringing in investors including TPG GP Solutions, HarbourVest, and Goldman Sachs in a deal valuing the business at over €2 billion.

WebPros: Strategic M&A to Enter North America

WebPros started as Plesk, a suite of software products lacking a dedicated team or organisational structure. With the support of serial hosting entrepreneurs Thomas Strohe and Jochen Berger, Oakley executed a complex carve-out from larger group Parallels, forming the nucleus for a new business that would become a new global SaaS leader supporting 85 million websites.

The first step post-carve-out was to build an independent organisational platform from scratch- covering sales, marketing, finance, HR. The next step was to enhance this independent business with selective acquisitions, consolidating mission-critical developer tools to serve the global web hosting ecosystem.

US peer cPanel was identified as a strategic acquisition that would help WebPros expand into North America. Oakley’s relationship-driven approach together with its strong relationship with Tom and Jochen convinced cPanel’s founder to combine forces with WebPros. In 2019, Oakley sold the combined business at a €2 billion valuation and earning a 6.7x gross return for Fund III before reinvesting alongside CVC.

Oakley's partnership with Jochen Berger and Thomas Strohe

Also Notable: this is not the only €1bln+ hosting business that Oakley has created with Thomas Strohe, and Jochen Berger. Through strategic M&A and talent acquisition, together we have built Contabo, a €1bn+ SME cloud hosting provider with 24 data centres across four continents. To date, Oakley has partnered with the serial hosting entrepreneurs on five separate deals, most recently hosting.com, a buy-and-build platform that has completed 10 acquisitions in under 18 months.

Tomas Strohe — Watch our interview with Tom Strohe

TechInsights: Transitioning to Recurring Revenue

In 2017, Oakley invested in TechInsights as a carve out from AXIO Group. Already a global leader in chip research, the company sold mostly one-off, project-based research on semiconductors to some of the largest, most hi-tech companies in the world.

Oakley saw potential to productise TechInsight’s substantial knowledge base and shift the business to a higher-quality, recurring revenue model and earning it a higher valuation multiple.

Now, TechInsights provides semiconductor tear-down analysis to a global subscriber base - serving surging demand for information about the chips that are driving the AI revolution. We also supported management’s ambitious buy-and-build strategy with three bolt-on acquisitions to expand content and customers.

In 2021, we exited at a €500 million valuation, generating a 10x gross return, and reinvested alongside CVC.

Grupo Primavera: Building an Iberian SaaS Leader

Oakley applied its proven buy-and-build model to Grupo Primavera, a leading Iberian SaaS business. Our first investment in Spain, Ekon, had €20m in revenue but clear strategic potential as a regional platform for larger SaaS acquirers who had struggled to build a champion in Iberia.

We quickly built a senior leadership team, appointing Jeremy Roche (founder of FinancialForce) as Chair and Santiago Solanas as CEO to execute an intensive buy-and-build strategy. Over the next three years, they executed 11 acquisitions across Spain, Portugal, and Africa - including a game-changing deal with Primavera in 2021.

Backed by product innovation and talent investment, Grupo Primavera outperformed expectations, becoming Iberia’s largest software platform in just three years. In 2022, Oakley agreed the strategic combination of the business with France-based Cegid in a transaction valuing the business at around €500 million.

Conclusion

These companies are all riding powerful megatrends - hybrid learning, digitisation, and cloud migration. But what sets them apart are the exceptional founders driving their profitable growth. At Oakley, our role isn’t to get in their way, but to support them by investing in infrastructure, governance, and talent - in essence, building the scaffolding for sustainable scale and long-term investor appeal.

If you’d like to learn how Oakley can support your growth journey, please get in touch at origination[@]oakleycapital.com.