WAD Capital's $72.5M Close Could Reshape European SME Ownership

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-04

Belgian investment firm WAD Capital has just hit a major milestone, and it's one that could change how we think about small business ownership in Europe. The Ghent-based company completed the first closing of its debut fund at $72.5 million, thanks in large part to a $27 million investment from the European Investment Fund (EIF). That makes the EU's development bank the biggest single backer of WAD's first fund. But here's what's really interesting: WAD isn't your typical private equity shop. Instead of buying companies and flipping them, they're solving one of Europe's biggest hidden problems—what happens when a successful business owner retires and has no one to pass the company to. ### The Succession Crisis Nobody's Talking About Across Europe, hundreds of thousands of small and mid-sized businesses are facing a ticking clock. The owners are aging out, and there's no family member or obvious buyer waiting in the wings. Without a successor, these companies—which employ millions of people—risk shutting down or being sold to foreign competitors. WAD Capital's solution is elegantly simple. They acquire profitable companies that have this succession problem, then hand them over to experienced operators they call "CEOs in Residence." These aren't fresh MBAs looking for their first gig. They're proven managers who've been carefully vetted and trained to take the reins from day one. The firm targets companies with EBITDA between $1.1 million and $5.4 million across the Benelux region, northern France, and western Germany. Their sweet spots are healthcare, energy and climate transition, and business services. ### Why the EIF's Backing Matters Robert de Groot, Vice President of the EIB Group, put it well when he said that Europe's SMEs have strong growth potential but need both capital and entrepreneurial talent to reach the next stage. He sees WAD's approach as a way to keep business continuity, protect jobs, and boost long-term competitiveness. That institutional validation is huge. When the EU's own development bank puts its weight behind a first-time fund, it signals that the model isn't just clever—it's necessary. The EIF's investment came through the European Commission's InvestEU programme, which is designed to mobilize private investment for strategic projects. ### A Model That's Already Producing Results Here's the part that made me sit up and take notice: WAD Capital was only founded in 2023 by Christopher Tournis Gamble, Steven Coppens, and Alain Brossé. Yet in less than a year, eight of their first thirteen CEOs in Residence have already completed acquisitions. The list of companies they've bought reads like a who's who of European small business—an HVAC group, a construction firm, a security specialist, a tire distributor, two packaging companies, an insurance broker, and an events business. Five more deals are in the final stages of closing. Coppens, the Managing Partner, isn't shy about what this means. "Eight acquisitions in less than a year and a substantial investment from the European Investment Fund," he said. "This shows our model is scalable, and that Europe also recognises the importance of what we do." ### The Search-Fund Model, Supercharged What WAD is doing isn't entirely new. The "search fund" model has been around for decades, and it's delivered an average internal rate of return of about 35 percent over the past thirty years. But WAD is scaling it up in a way that hasn't been done before. Instead of one person hunting for a single company to buy and run, WAD runs a data-driven operation that screens tens of thousands of companies each year. They've even paired that with AI-assisted legal due diligence tools to speed up deals that would normally be too small to justify conventional advisory costs. "We are not setting up yet another private equity fund for SMEs," Brossé said. "We are scaling up the search-fund model to create one of Europe's largest institutional platforms for Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition." ### What's Next for WAD Capital The fresh capital will fund a second cohort of twelve CEOs in Residence, ten of whom are already confirmed. The firm plans to double its cohort size and expand its portfolio to 25 companies by the end of 2027. Here's a stat that puts the opportunity in perspective: the average IRR of 35 percent over three decades isn't just a nice talking point. It means that for every dollar invested, investors have historically seen more than a third back in annual returns. That's the kind of performance that attracts serious institutional money. WAD's managing partners are also putting their own skin in the game—they're contributing 2 percent of the fund's capital themselves, alongside a group of family investors. That tells you they believe in what they're building. The firm is now pushing toward a $140 million target with a hard cap of $143 million. If they hit it, they'll have one of the largest dedicated platforms for this kind of entrepreneurship in Europe. ### Why This Matters Beyond Europe You might be wondering why a US audience should care about a Belgian fund buying small companies in Europe. The answer is that succession problems aren't unique to Europe. Baby boomer business owners across the United States are facing the exact same issue, and the search-fund model is gaining traction here too. What WAD is proving is that this approach can work at institutional scale. That's a lesson that could reshape how we think about preserving the backbone of any economy—the small and mid-sized businesses that employ most of the workforce. As Coppens put it, "Hundreds of thousands of European SMEs are looking for a successor but cannot find one. With this capital, we can match CEOs with those companies more quickly, and keep more jobs and businesses in European hands." That's not just good for Europe. It's a blueprint for how to keep entrepreneurial legacies alive, no matter where they are.