While the venture capital industry spent the last decade chasing consumer apps and foundation models, a quieter kind of software company was getting built: the vertical SaaS tools that manage POS systems for retailers, run logistics operations, and handle accounts payable for thousands of businesses that have never heard of a Series A round. They are also where AI has the most still to do. Now those companies have become the target of a new class of acquirer.
In the last month alone, two of these acquirers have made headlines. In Toronto, Beacon Software has raised more than $550 million in two years, including a $225 million Series C led by General Catalyst, to acquire niche software businesses and rebuild them on a shared AI platform. In Milan, Bending Spoons is reportedly eyeing a Nasdaq IPO at a $20 billion-plus valuation,though its focus is consumer software. And in London, the group behind Shop Circle has stepped out under a new holding company brand.
The company has launched Circeus as its holding company, alongside an equity investment from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and other investors. Shop Circle continues as the group’s retail and commerce software division; Circeus is the brand for the wider B2B software portfolio sitting above it. The new name and the institutional backer are, taken together, a signal of intent: a group positioning itself at the front of Europe’s AI-native software acquirers, in the same bracket as Beacon Software in North America.
What changed, and what the name means
Luca Cartechini and Gian Maria Gramondi founded what became Shop Circle in late 2021, initially focused on commerce and supply chain software. Over four years, 18 acquisitions and more than $200m raised, the business expanded well beyond its origins. It now serves more than 200,000 businesses across multiple software categories, not just commerce, with operations in London, Milan, and Sarajevo.
With the rebranding, Circeus signals the holding company structure and the broader B2B software portfolio, while Shop Circle continues as the retail and commerce software division: the same rebrand logic Facebook used when it became Meta, the parent company for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other business units.
“We were not running a fundraising process, as we are profitable and well capitalised, but we chose to make space for EBRD given their institutional standing, and to be even more active in a market that currently presents several attractive opportunities,” said Luca Cartechini, founder and CEO, Circeus.
Why this model is different
Traditional software roll-ups buy companies, cut costs, and sell. The AI-native version inverts that logic entirely. According to the company, the goal is not to make acquired businesses cheaper to run. It is to make them meaningfully better: to take software that customers already depend on and evolve it from a passive record-keeping tool into something that actively executes work on their behalf.
Circeus does this through a centralised AI engineering team that moves across the portfolio, embedding AI into acquired products and building agentic workflows that can be reused across multiple businesses. According to the company, the results are already visible: a double-digit share of net new bookings driven by AI features, customer experience automation reaching approximately 80% in several products, and more than 100% improvement in developer productivity.
“Across different businesses, we have proven that evolving a product into its AI-native form can drive a step-change in the market it can address. The hard part is doing this repeatedly, and that is what we have built,” said Gian Maria Gramondi, founder and COO, Circeus.
There is a structural logic here that standalone software businesses cannot replicate. The best AI engineering talent concentrates in frontier labs and elite tech companies, out of reach for most vertical software firms. A holding company that centralises that engineering and deploys it across a portfolio closes the gap, and compounds it: as the central team builds capability across more products, the transformation it offers each new acquisition improves.
Why Europe, and why the EBRD
Only around 1 in 5 European enterprises reported using AI in 2025, according to Eurostat. The US figure is also similar. The gap between what AI can do and what most businesses actually use it for remains vast. Europe’s fragmentation, dozens of languages, regulatory regimes, and commercial cultures, makes this opportunity specific: a holding company that acquires category-leading vertical software in individual European markets and connects them to shared AI infrastructure has an advantage organic growth cannot match.
The EBRD’s involvement reinforces this. Its mandate spans more than 30 countries, many of them markets where Circeus is actively acquiring. “Circeus’s compounding model aligns closely with EBRD’s long-term mandate. The market for bringing AI to the real economy is enormous,” said Bruno Lusic, investor, EBRD.
The AI-native roll-up thesis is compelling, and Circeus is among the first to prove it at scale. Open questions remain, as they would for any model this new. But Circeus’s bet is on depth. The proprietary workflows and domain knowledge inside vertical software are not replicated by general models, and that specificity is durable. With the market enormous and AI adoption still low, the runway is long. Several acquisitions are expected to complete in the coming months. The race is on, and Europe, for once, has a credible entry at the front.
This article is produced in a content partnership with Circeus.
