- London-based Circeus has acquired Encodian, the UK-based document automation provider built natively on the Microsoft Power Platform.
- The acquisition marks its 18th in the last four years.
- Founded in 2016, Encodian serves more than 3,000 paying customers across 80 geographies.
Enterprises run on common, everyday tasks that are crucial to success. Document generation, data extraction, workflow management, and other various digital tasks contribute to how efficiently a company is organised. Now, this work is increasingly being handed over to AI agents.
Encodian’s flagship tool, Flowr, currently automates the former tasks (and plenty more) inside Microsoft 365, Azure and the Power Platform. It serves more than 3,000 paying customers across 80 geographies through more than 250 ready-to-use actions across nine Power Automate connectors. Its customers span manufacturing, healthcare, and the public sector, all of which are industries where document workflows must operate at the highest standard and the cost of failure is high.
With this acquisition, Circeus has now added Encodian to its B2B software portfolio. It will help develop more AI capabilities and add sophisticated agentic experiences to Encodian’s current offerings.
Jay Goodison, who founded Encodian and continues as managing director, will stay on to lead the business. The brand, team and customer relationships remain intact, consistent with Circeus’s stated model of acquiring to hold rather than to flip.
“Joining Circeus lets us keep doing what we do best while adding AI engineering and reach we could not have built alone. Nothing changes for our customers except the pace at which the product improves,” says Goodison.
The thesis behind the deal
The acquisition is the clearest expression yet of Circeus’s core argument about where value accrues in the AI era. It is a common misconception that AI will replace enterprise software. The more durable bet is that AI agents will need reliable systems to execute work inside enterprise environments. Encodian already provides those capabilities inside Microsoft, the world’s most widely adopted productivity ecosystem.
“Encodian is the thesis in action. The most defensible software in the AI era is the software AI agents need to act through, not the software AI threatens to replace. Encodian already sits at the point of execution inside Microsoft 365, and that is exactly where we want to invest,” says Gian Maria Gramondi, co-founder and COO of Circeus.
Microsoft ambitiously wants to secure hundreds of millions of Power Platform users. Therefore, Encodian’s addressable market is expanding largely independent of its own go-to-market spend. Owning a category-leading product, at the moment, AI agents are beginning to need it most, which puts the company in a favourable position.
A group hitting its stride
The Encodian deal comes just weeks after Circeus launched publicly as a holding company and announced new equity financing from the EBRD and other investors.
As TFN reported at the time, the rebranding formalised the next stage of the company’s thesis: building an AI-native holding company that acquires mission-critical vertical software across categories and connects each acquisition to a centralised AI engineering capability.
In the weeks since that launch, Circeus co-founders Luca Cartechini and Gian Maria Gramondi have moved quickly. With more than $220m in total capital raised, 18 acquisitions completed in four years, and 200,000-plus businesses served worldwide, the group is scaling at what it describes as its fastest pace yet. The company has added more revenue this year than in the previous two years combined.
What Circeus brings to Encodian
Encodian will gain access to Circeus’s centralised AI platform, a growing library of agents with skills that can be deployed across the product. More robust agentic workflows — on top of the document automation foundation Encodian has already established — will be within short reach.
Circeus has generated consistent results across its portfolio, including a double-digit share of net new bookings driven by AI features, customer experience automation reaching approximately 80% in several products, and developer productivity improvements exceeding 100%.
The broader picture is more significant. Europe’s AI-native software roll-up race is accelerating, with Bending Spoons’ recent successful Nasdaq debut giving the category its first major public benchmark. Circeus is building its case from London, with a playbook it believes is stronger than the traditional private equity model — and a portfolio that, deal by deal, is beginning to prove it.
This article is produced in a content partnership with Circeus.
