ODEWALD KMU 2025 review
Together with our investors and portfolio teams, we can look back on a very intense year in 2025. Over the past 12 months, we have successfully completed a total of nine transactions, making it a very successful year. With this momentum behind us, we are entering an exciting 2026, in which we are already working intensively on further transactions.
In addition to the exit from Spieth & Wensky, which was successfully sold in the first half of the year, the focus in 2025 was primarily on establishing two further buy & build platforms and successfully completing six add-on transactions that will contribute to the sustained value creation of our portfolio companies.
At the beginning of the year, we acquired a majority stake in healthcare provider Softdoor. Softdoor is Germany's leading provider in the social impact sector, helping people with multiple barriers to employment, such as mental and physical illnesses, to (re)integrate into the labour market. Its services include feasibility analyses and coaching measures to facilitate re-entry into the labour market. The group is thus an ideal buy & build platform for playing a leading role in the consolidation of this market.
With a majority stake in HiOffice Group, we invested in the leading and fastest-growing provider of social recruiting services in the DACH region in autumn. The aim is to establish the market leader for technology- and AI-based recruitment of skilled workers on social media through strong organic growth and active consolidation. Shortly after our investment, the buy & build strategy was successfully launched with two add-on acquisitions and the market entry into Austria.
Two further strategic milestones were achieved with our vocational training platform Education partners through the eighth and ninth add-on transactions: On the one hand, this further expanded the range of services and market position in the highly attractive healthcare sector and opened up the Swiss education market in addition to the German and Austrian markets. On the other hand, the Education partners business cluster was further strengthened and expanded to include the retraining sector.
Our travel tech company GIATA is a central hub for global travel technology, providing the critical data infrastructure for smarter decisions and AI readiness in the international travel market. At GIATA, we were also able to further expand our service portfolio through two acquisitions in the second half of the year: with the acquisition of a rapidly growing AI decision-making platform focusing on high-speed profiling and decision automation, GIATA is able to optimise its unrivalled data, content and mapping expertise with intelligent and innovative personalisation technology. With the acquisition of a renowned ranking platform in autumn, data-driven formats will be developed in the future that will set new standards in the travel industry and position GIATA as an information platform for modern, personalised travel experiences.
After this intense year 2025, we are looking forward to 2026, when the ODEWALD KMU team will implement further exciting transactions. The clear focus will be on fast-growing, service-oriented business models in fragmented markets, supported by megatrends such as education, digitalisation, modernisation and sustainability.