Revaia Portfolio Days 2025: European Scale-ups Navigate Market Shifts and Growth Challenges
Revaia held its annual Portfolio Days in the Mediterranean village of Carry-le-Rouet, which sits along the spectacular La Côte Bleue.
This rugged stretch of coastline in southern France is where traditional fishing villages and azure waters create an atmosphere of tranquility that attracted such artists as Paul Cézanne. The coastline is blanketed with Aleppo pines, a native species well-adapted to the dry, rocky conditions and known for their twisted trunks and umbrella-shaped canopies.
Each year, we select a location that feels removed from the daily pressures of scaling technology businesses to bring together our community of LPs, founders, and portfolio company leaders for two days of intensive discussion and knowledge sharing. This is a chance for deep reflection on the challenges and opportunities facing European tech companies and the kind of honest, strategic conversations that can only happen when leaders pause to examine their journeys from a broader perspective.
The past year has brought significant shifts, including the continued evolution of AI integration to changing investor expectations and the ongoing maturation of the European tech ecosystem. Our portfolio companies have demonstrated remarkable resilience and growth, making this an ideal moment to share insights and benchmark performance across the community.
For Portfolio Days 2025, we focused on themes that reflected the current moment: embedding AI and cybersecurity into operations, building high-performing growth teams, navigating capital markets and valuation shifts, and preparing for the transition from venture capital to growth buyout.
As always, the event was private and off the record to encourage candid discussion. But we are sharing a few highlights and data points to help the broader European tech community benefit from the collective wisdom of founders and operators who have successfully navigated these scaling challenges.
We’ll share more details from these sessions in future newsletters.
Morgan Stanley's Market Reality Check
Victoria Johnston Roussillon, a Vice President in Technology Investment Banking at Morgan Stanley, offered a clear-eyed assessment of today’s market environment and the evolving IPO landscape. Her presentation portrayed a tech sector that has matured significantly since the exuberance of 2021, while also underscoring that Europe is still in the process of building world-leading tech giants.
“We have our own tech giants such as SAP, Dassault Systèmes, Revolut - but we need more !” she noted.
While the global tech IPO market remains challenged, Victoria pointed to encouraging signals. “The number of tech IPOs dropped from 124 at the peak in 2021 to just 2 in 2022” she explained. “In 2024, there were 9, and that figure is expected to almost double in 2025. Although this remains below the historical average of around 50 tech IPOs per year, the market is clearly on a path to recovery.”
She emphasized that for companies considering a public listing, the bar has been raised considerably. “The threshold in terms of revenue is now above 300€ million - €400 million, profitability is paramount, and we generally advise that a valuation north of €2 billion offers a safer path” she said.
Victoria Roussillon
Victoria also highlighted how recent geopolitical developments and rising concerns around sovereignty and strategic autonomy are beginning to fuel momentum in certain sectors. “The multipolar environment is benefiting European AI and cloud companies such as OVH and Mistral” she said. “In defence and aerospace - Europe has been reinvesting heavily in its domestic industry. That has created significant value for that sector: more than €442 billion in aggregated market cap in just a couple of years.” She concluded with a forward-looking perspective: “This is a compelling example of what Europe can achieve when it concentrates its efforts on building its own technologies and champions”.
AI Integration: Beyond the Buzzword
The discussion moderated by Guillaume Vitrich from White & Case brought together companies at distinctly different stages of AI adoption:
- Definely: an AI-native company where artificial intelligence is core to the product.
- Frontify: an "AI-seasoned" company integrating AI into an established platform.
- White & Case: an AI-adjacent traditional industry being transformed by AI.
Definely CEO Nnamdi Emelifeonwu explained that the legal tech company has taken a vertical approach to its AI strategy, building a productivity suite to help legal teams create and review legal documents. with AI at its foundation.
In June, Revaia led the $30M Series B round for the London-based startup, which believes a targeted solution developed by lawyers for lawyers is more valuable to the legal industry than horizontal tools like ChatGPT.
"Our strategy has actually been quite intentional about what it is we do and what we do very, very well," Emelifeonwu explained. "There's almost a risk that you can try to be all-encompassing and do everything and try to please everyone by doing too much with AI. We built real products that gave real value and solved real problems for our users."
In contrast, Frontify founder Roger Dudler represented the "AI-seasoned" category. The 12-year-old marketing and brand management platform has been systematically integrating AI capabilities into its existing suite. Roger described this incremental approach that solves practical problems for customers: "For us, for example, AI-powered metadata management is a big thing. Automatically enriching images with metadata unlocks immediate value for our customers."
Guillaume, representing the international legal firm that has a major tech sector practice, said such traditional industries are grappling with AI's transformative potential. He was particularly optimistic about Definely’s potential.
"I think the very reason why you're going to be extremely successful, and why legal techs are going to be really successful, is that many people think that lawyers are incentivized to spend as much time as possible on a matter because they bill by the hour, in fact that’s not the case" he noted. "The reason is that there is too much work for us. That's why AI is key for us, because it's a matter of productivity, to enable us to handle the flow of work."
The Evolving CRO Landscape
As companies scale from early growth to later stages, they must deliver the kind of performance and growth that will satisfy either growth equity investors or public markets. To deliver on those critical metrics, more companies are turning to the Chief Revenue Officer, a position that has become the linchpin of high-performing growth teams, responsible for orchestrating increasingly complex go-to-market strategies across sales, marketing, and customer success.
Lilian Poilpot
Because revenue growth can make or break a scaling company's trajectory, we decided to highlight the importance of a role that traditionally has not been as recognized as other C-suite positions.
The discussion on Chief Revenue Officer hiring began with sobering market realities presented by Lilian Poilpot, Partner at executive search firm Erevena. Lilian's presentation highlighted the structural challenges facing revenue leadership in European scale-ups, including immense pressure that often leads to short tenures.
While leading AI companies recruit CROs with deep enterprise sales backgrounds, Lilian sees AI as a fundamental disruptor reshaping the role entirely. “We used to have predictable SaaS playbooks,” he explained, “but AI’s rapid evolution is forcing a complete rewrite.”
This shift demands new CRO capabilities. Lilian predicts the future belongs to “augmented CROs” who can seamlessly integrate AI agents - both for internal processes and client sales. Those clinging to relationship-only approaches will be left behind.
Pierre Casanova, who helped scale Contentsquare from €3M to several hundreds of millions ARR, echoed that trend of increasing complexity. “The thing that hasn't changed is that it’s a damn difficult job. You've got the pressure every quarter,” he said. "What has changed is everything else. The scope over time, it was just sales, and then it expanded to customer success – revenue growth from upsell, cross sales, and also retention. The partnership with the CMO has been closer than it was before. It's a much more integrated view these days. The other side of the job that has changed is probably the variety of KPIs you've got to master. It used to be your growth in the quarter, plus the sales productivity. And now it's CAC, it's LTV, it's net retention, gross retention. You have to have this ability to operate in a much wider environment."
Barbara Holzapfel, a seasoned tech CMO, said that the need for closer collaboration between CRO and CMO tracks with her experience, especially as AI is fundamentally changing the game for growth strategies. Barbara has led global marketing and growth strategies at top tech and fintech companies, including Genesys, Microsoft, SAP, Taulia, and Addepar, and currently serves as board chair for Revaia portfolio company Welcome to the Jungle. "It's so critical for CMOs to be exceptional cross-functional leaders and really have a very high collaboration IQ." She advocated for shared KPIs, a shared CRO/CMO pipeline view and a "no blame culture" where leaders "come to those conversations together, not with your functional hat, but with your company hat."
Barbara Holzapfel - Pierre Casanova - Gary Roth
Cybersecurity: The New Normal of Constant Threats
Freddy Milesi, CEO of Sekoia.io, presented a stark assessment of the cybersecurity landscape facing scale-ups. In April, Revaia led the company’s €26M Series B round.
"You can't avoid being attacked. Just keep in mind that as a scale-up, you are a great target for hackers because you are highly visible and you offer hackers a great return on investment," he warned.
The discussion highlighted how AI is transforming both attack and defense capabilities. "The main difference from before is that there's no limit anymore to the imagination in terms of content productions," Freddy explained. “Before, you had plenty of low-level phishing attacks. But now, it’s much easier to impersonate someone in a very convincing way - or even an entire application. And it's no longer static. You can interact, triggering a fully automated and orchestrated sequence of actions.”
His practical advice centered on adopting a "zero trust" mentality: "As a human, you need to become paranoid. If you are not authenticated, or the people you are talking to are not authenticated, then it can be someone impersonating you."
The VC to PE Transition
The event concluded with insights from Jean-Daniel Bertoncini, Partner at Five Arrows, who discussed the transition from venture capital to private equity backing. The timing was particularly significant: Five Arrows had just signed exclusivity to acquire a majority stake in Hublo, marking Revaia's first major exit.
Jean-Daniel outlined what private equity investors look for in growth-stage companies. "For us, one of the most important metric is retention,” he said. “We love the fact that you start your year, and you know you're going to grow 20%...Retention is number one. We would really struggle without this profile."
Beyond retention, he highlighted the Rule of 40 as a key metric and a minimum revenue threshold of around €8-10 million ARR, noting that the "rule of 40 is a strong sign of product-market fit and market power."
Such metrics are critical, he said, because private equity firms approach value creation differently than VCs.
“In VC, you are making lots of bets and you're really doing moonshots,” Jean-Daniel said. “Our model is different. We're very concentrated. We make 10-12 deals per fund. We have never lost capital on any of our investments. So the way we look at the world is through a much narrower range of outcomes. We think in most cases that we'll do well and we want to identify the levers to do very well.”