Rewriting the M&A playbook: Inside Visma’s acquisition strategy

For a lot of European tech founders, an acquisition deal often comes with a trade-off: a financial advantage at the cost of operational freedom.

But an acquisition done right allows founders to successfully de-risk while keeping future upsides through earnouts. It’s often a safer alternative to VC funding, which dilutes ownership and increases risk without necessarily guaranteeing a bigger payout.

According to Sifted data, between May 2025 and May 2026, 753 startups were acquired across Europe, showing only a slight decrease from the 804 companies acquired in the same time period the year before.

A growing number of VC-backed startups are raising capital to buy. So far this year, 17 startups have raised funding and plan to use at least part of the capital to pursue acquisitions — including Swedish AI legaltech unicorn Legora and UK-based proptech company Dwelly.

European software company Visma is actively rewriting the traditional M&A playbook. Rather than absorbing its portfolio companies, Visma acquires promising early-stage companies and gives them a high degree of independence.

“We are not big believers in full integration. We want most of the decisions to be made very close to the customer and the market,” says Ari-Pekka Salovaara, chief growth officer at Visma.

“Why our acquired founders stay after the earnouts, is that we act as a club of other founders,” he says. “You still have operational freedom but you are not alone. You get help from your peers.”

Sifted sat down with Salovaara, Bernat Ripoll, co-managing director (MD) of accounting and payroll software company Holded and Michiel Chevalier, managing director of HR software company Nmbrs to explore how access to shared resources, expertise and a broader ecosystem can be a unique advantage for acquired businesses — and how the right acquisition can actually help companies to grow independently. 

Identifying ‘future winners’ 

When assessing companies to acquire, Visma targets businesses with a strong team, promising product and high customer satisfaction. 

Around 10 years ago, the company would have focused more on companies that were already profitable and mature in the market, says Salovaara.

“But the problem with doing that is you buy companies that are older and might not be able to win the future market anymore. The biggest learning curve was choosing those future winners earlier."

When Visma acquired Holded in 2021, the company was not looking to sell. “We just raised a Series B round (€15m) six months before the acquisition,” says Ripoll. “Then Visma approached us the very same week and two other players approached us too. Momentum happened."

When you raise money through venture capital, selling up often looks like an inevitability, he adds. “It's not if but when you sell.”

Chevalier also found that before Visma acquired Nmbrs in 2020, the company was struggling to expand.

“It's difficult to build but also difficult to acquire new customers,” he says. “There's a very time-framed moment where companies switch payroll providers. We were also spending more and more time on ‘overhead’ projects, security, logging, invoicing rather than focusing on building the product for users.” 

Autonomy and cross-company collaboration

After an acquisition closes, Visma places importance on operational freedom within its portfolio companies. 

Acquired businesses keep their existing management, processes and CRMs and only adopt standard communication tools such as Slack to facilitate cross-company collaboration.

“If you try to make decisions centralised, the problem is you don't really see all the details of that specific market and that specific customer,” says Salovaara.

Both Ripoll and his co-MD are still part of Holded four years after selling. The company now has access to shared accounting, invoicing and fintech resources.

“We can have smart conversations on how to grow the product, not just the company,” Ripoll says. “As long as we're aligned with the board, the independence really feels like how it was before we sold."

Visma curates the boards of its acquired companies using founders within its portfolio, creating a mentorship dynamic where smaller startups can learn directly from those who have successfully scaled.

One of the ways working with Visma has helped Nmbrs is through developing a new pricing model, adds Chevalier.

“We still had this old ‘all-you-can-eat’ type pricing model where you could use all the features that we’d been building in the past 20 years in one plan,” he says. “It was time for us to package it in a better way, and that was one of the ways Visma could help us."

“It’s always a bit lonely at the top”: Creating a club of founders

Acquisitions can cure the isolation of leadership. As a CEO, it’s always a “bit lonely at the top,” says Chevalier, who, after selling to Visma, became part of the managing director community of other founders

Visma’s companies also don't have to reinvent the wheel. If 500 different AI experiments are running across the group, founders can review the best results from their peers, saving time and resources, says Salovaara.

Acquisitions are ultimately built on trust, adds Ripoll. “As a founder you are going to be working with people from Visma and you've got to really get along with those people in order to continue the journey."

Working with Visma has also allowed employees at Holded to have peer conversations with other portfolio companies, he adds. “We may not be in the same market but we can have very transparent conversations. For example, ‘In France they're doing this, in another country they're doing that,' so we get to learn from each other."

“Visma also has this aggregated data used for us to compete,” Ripoll adds. “For example, we want to be the company that grows the most in a quarter or the company that makes the most money per employee.

“It pushes our team because they want to win. Having this mentality creates healthy competition because you're not winning or losing anything, it's just for yourself."