Interestingly, more than half of those investments have been in European-headquartered businesses—and, despite the volatile macroeconomic climate globally, we see a strong opportunity to fund many more European businesses in the future. 

As Battery looks to increase its investment activity in Europe, and better support its existing portfolio in the region, we are bolstering our on-the-ground, ITLST presence in London. Stefan Momic, one of our vice presidents, recently relocated to London to better support our European activity and is leading recruitment efforts to build out a local investment team in Europe.  

Why Europe? 

In our experience, the region has consistently proven to be a very fertile ground for innovation in industrial tech and life-science tools. Europe has a deep-rooted culture of high-end technology addressing critical trends – from meeting new environmental regulations spurred by climate change and concerns about contaminants like PFAS (“forever chemicals”), to increasing automation to address labor shortages, to contributing to scientific research at the forefront of fighting global diseases.  

European ITLST companies are also, we believe, well-aligned with the value Battery can provide. Most of the businesses we back in countries like Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K., among others, are decades old and most often, family- or management-owned. Often, they’re venerable national champions who realize that to continue growing, they need to start competing outside their home market, which brings a new suite of challenges as they look to flourish in an increasingly globalized world.  

Specifically, these companies may see the need to expand into new geographies or business sectors; up-level their management teams across locations; upgrade technology systems; or increase R&D investment to develop new products and grow organically. Battery offers support in all these areas and offers family- and management-owned businesses a different path for the business and its employees rather than selling out to larger companies. Additionally, Battery helps with the identification, origination and execution of add-on acquisitions that complement and often accelerate organic growth initiatives. 

Many of these companies operate in niche markets, but they frequently make critical, often under-the-radar, technology to enable solutions in important areas like food and water safety, medical innovation and next-generation industrial safety, to name a few. Our most recent European ITLST investments, for example, are steute*, a founder-owned provider of switches and sensors for critical medical and industrial-safety applications, and Skalar Analytical*, a management-owned provider of automated laboratory analyzers for environmental, food & beverage and energy applications.  

Our European footprint 

In Europe to date, our ITLST practice has invested in 10 “platform” companies, and 55 total companies including add-ons since 2003 across 12 different countries, deploying more than EUR 750 million in capital. 

Spotlight: Laboratory tech   

Our investment approach is very thesis-driven and thematic. As an example, the “laboratory tech” space is one sector we’ve focused on, with our flexible mandate allowing us to partner with a wide range of companies serving laboratory customers. Since 2018, we’ve backed European companies across a variety of different business models in this sector, including instrumentation (SPT Labtech* and Skalar*), consumables (AnalytiChem*), services (ifp Labs*) and software (Titian Software*). Skalar*, Bernd Kraft* (starting point for AnalytiChem*), ifp* and Titian* were all founder- or management-owned businesses. 

Our strategy for each of these businesses includes continued investment in organic growth initiatives, plus a healthy mix of add-on acquisitions. At Skalar, for example, we helped the management team identify and execute five complementary founder-owned add-on acquisitions expanding Skalar’s geographic footprint in North America (EST Analytical* and PromoChrom*) and Asia (GERSTEL*’s Japanese and Chinese subsidiaries), while continuing to strengthen Skalar’s European footprint (GERSTEL*, TE Instruments* and LCTech*). On the organic-growth side, having a global sales channel provides accelerated expansion opportunities for all brands. Additionally, we are supporting numerous new product-development efforts at the company, particularly around software and consumables as we look to increase high-quality revenue. We’ve followed a similar global acquisition strategy with Germany-based AnalytiChem, completing seven add-on acquisitions across six countries – Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, Canada, USA and Australia – in a little over two years.  

In contrast, our strategy for ifp Labs is much more regionalized, focused solely on the pan-European market. To that end, our M&A efforts have been more focused on Europe, with one of our acquisitions expanding ifp’s capabilities in the water testing space, while the other three acquisitions expanded our food quality laboratory network in the UK. All seven add-ons at AnalytiChem and all four add-ons at ifp Labs were family- or founder-owned as well. 

Our strategy and approach is not one-size-fits-all; it is highly tailored to the specific circumstances and desires of a given company’s  management team. We believe our experience with family- and management-owned businesses across a wide range of geographies, business models and end-markets provide a strong foundation for us to support our companies. 

The road ahead 

We continue to be excited about the investment opportunities in Europe across a wide range of industrial tech and life science tools markets. The market overall continues to be highly segmented, with domestic champions on the cusp of turning into global and pan-European leaders through acquisitions and organic growth. We are excited to support these innovative companies through the next phase of their growth journey—please feel free to get in touch if you would like to speak with us. 

The post The Opportunity in Industrial Tech & Life Science Tools in Europe appeared first on Battery Ventures.

As in previous quarters, we surveyed 100 CXOs who collectively represent over $35 billion in annual technology spending. Our goal was, as always, to gauge the budget planning and overall sentiment of large, enterprise technology buyers.

Note: We conducted the survey in late March 2025, prior to the Trump administration’s tariff announcement on April 2. While the subsequent market volatility may impact buyer sentiment score—particularly in sectors with greater exposure to tariffs—most enterprise IT budgets aren’t subject to major revisions due to macroeconomic factors. In some categories, IT spending may be actually accelerated by such forces—for instance, investments in AI or cloud for modernization and reducing risk to future development. The technology sector’s tariff risk is also not yet known.

To catch up on previous reports, check out what we published in March 2023, September 2023, April 2024 and September 2024.

A few highlights from the survey:

• Cloud migration is accelerating as enterprises modernize infrastructure, creating fresh opportunities for AI-driven innovation and agile operations. While 54% of enterprises still run a majority of their compute on-premises, momentum is shifting fast. With 73% accelerating or continuing their move to public cloud, the opportunity for cloud technology providers is expanding rapidly.
• VMware’s recent pricing hike appears to be driving a once-in-a-generation push from on-prem to cloud infrastructure.
• In another major move, enterprises are refreshing core systems like ITSM, ERP, and CRM systems now to gain next-gen functionality like AI and automation. In good news for software vendors, they’re largely looking to new software players to meet those needs.
• Generative AI and LLMs have overtaken cloud infrastructure as the #1 priority for CXOs.
• Production AI use cases more than tripled since our last survey, jumping from 5.5% to 16%. Similarly, the agentic AI wave is building: 46% of enterprises are either actively deploying or in R&D for agentic AI.
• Other trends the survey revealed include a nascent trend towards decoupling SIEM and shifting to more modular security architectures.

We see a lot of fresh opportunities for early-stage technology startups in these survey findings. Check out the full report here to learn more:

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The post Survey Says: Tech Spending Slows Slightly, AI Tops CXO Priority List appeared first on Battery Ventures.

Our practice is diverse and focuses on critical enabling technologies for research, quality control, automation and scientific workflows, spanning instrumentation and sensor technologies, consumables (the picks and shovels enabling life-science research, analytical testing workflows and R&D) — even training and service providers.

Much like our software-investing colleagues, we prioritize what we call high-quality revenue: predictable and recurring revenue from consumables and services, over one-time product sales.

For our companies, which often have a number of revenue streams, from product sales and service contracts to consumable sales and software/data subscriptions, it can be more challenging to define value, especially on a comparative basis as the revenue mix varies across companies. But we are seeing more and more technology companies implement software-enabled products and services, as artificial intelligence becomes more accessible and as investors and management teams place a greater emphasis on revenue stability, especially in the wake of the pandemic.

Within our portfolio, we’ve always prioritized improving revenue mix as a key value creation lever, in addition to other key factors such as scale, organic growth rate, profitability and customer/market diversification to name a few.

So, we sought to quantify what we knew intuitively: that for non-software technology businesses, revenue quality mix is a meaningful indicator of value, and moreover, should serve as a key lever to help companies increase in value over time.

Based on a quantitative analysis of publicly-traded ITLST companies and our own portfolio, we created a new framework — the Revenue-Quality Podium — to help management teams, investors and industry stakeholders track value creation as companies transition to a higher share of high-quality revenue.

Download the Revenue-Quality Podium Whitepaper here to see our full analysis. 

The post Introducing the Revenue-Quality Podium: How Quality of Revenue Drives Value for Industrial Tech and Life-Science Tools Companies appeared first on Battery Ventures.

Background:

Battery’s first step in creating SPT Labtech occurred in 2015, when the team met the managing director of a company called TTP Labtech, then a subsidiary of diversified, U.K. technology company TTP Group. Battery kept in touch with the executive, David Newble, for several years about the possibility of spinning out TTP Labtech—which focused primarily on sample- management and sample-preparation technology for laboratories–and building a larger business around it.

In 2018, Battery announced the spinout of TTP Labtech and brought in executive Patrick Bennett to work with Newble to help build the company.  The newly branded SPT, based in the Melbourn Science Park near Cambridge, grew into a much larger firm offering a portfolio of automation, instrumentation and consumables products for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and academic-research markets. Some of the company’s products were even used to help sequence the genome of the Covid-19 virus.

Battery’s Impact:

Battery helped the company grow and scale in several ways, helping it create new, profitable workflows in drug discovery, structural biology, sample management, biobanking and genomics. Specific areas of assistance include:

• Recruited a number of C-level executives for the team, including Patrick Bennett, who served initially as CEO and then chairman; David Newble then became CEO and retained that role.
• Helped the company accelerate revenue growth organically and through acquisitions; provided strategic counsel and tactical assistance to help executives flesh out the commercial, and not just the research-and-development, aspect of the business.
• Created a more-efficient capital structure and increased operating leverage in the business.
• Executed an M&A program that resulted in SPT acquiring four companies: Apricot Designs, BioMicroLab, LBD Life Sciences, and Quantifoil.

Outcome:

SPT Labtech was acquired by EQT Private Equity in 2022, and Battery’s remaining stake in the company was acquired by DwyerOmega in 2024.

The post SPT Labtech, a provider of instrumentation and tools to facilitate life-science research appeared first on Battery Ventures.