Independent research on European small caps
Long-form, primary-source research on listed small caps in Switzerland, Italy, Austria and Germany
TECMA Solutions: The Platform Case Behind the Proptech Discount
TECMA Solutions is an Italian proptech that combines software, digital marketing and transaction infrastructure for residential developers. FY2025 revenue fell 11% to €12.4m and the balance sheet remains thin, but international revenue grew, recurring services more than doubled and the company continued to win credible customers. At the 4 September close of €1.235, the market capitalisation was €10.6m, below the level at which our original initiation said the valuation would become more interesting. The unresolved issue is now financing rather than AI displacement: shareholders vote on capital authorisations on 8 September and H1 results follow on 10 September. We remain Marketweight pending those disclosures.
Framework · AI & Business ModelsThe Support Cliff
GPU collateral does not depreciate in a smooth curve. It gets stranded. The software that makes an installed accelerator productive also determines when its economic life ends, and the manufacturer offering residual-value support is the same party setting that clock. NVIDIA's new infrastructure-financing partnerships make the question urgent: whether GPU-backed credit is diversified, or whether collateral value, contracted revenue and obligor solvency all deteriorate on the same generational trigger.
Where attention is scarce, mispricing is not.
No coverage, no scrutiny
Below €500m of market value, sell-side coverage thins; below €150m it has all but vanished. Prices there are set by fund flows, family holdings and habit — rarely by anyone who has read the accounts.
A few names, fully understood
We would rather know a handful of businesses completely than skim hundreds. An initiation is months of filings, registries, site visits and interviews — and most companies we examine, we decline.
Paid to wait
We look for cash-generative businesses priced to hold up even if nothing goes right. The safety is in what we pay; a margin recovery, a re-rating or first coverage is upside we haven’t paid for.
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The Disruptor's Price: Eat Yourself, or Buy Your Executioner
When AI coding made custom software nearly free, every horizontal SaaS company became its own most dangerous competitor's first target. The incumbents have answered in two ways: disrupt yourself before the market does, or buy the disruptor and absorb the blast. monday.com is the clearest case of the first. Wix is the clearest case of the second. Both are expensive, both are honest, and neither one fixes the seat.
Framework · AI & Business ModelsThe Cement Curve: AI Coding and the End of the Managed Margin
In two earlier notes we argued that AI deflates capability and concentrates value onto proprietary substrates, and that the market's error was filing every software business under capability. The same framework produces a harder conclusion when applied to the compute stack. A cloud provider sells raw infrastructure and the managed services layered on top of it; the margin lives in the software. The premium of SageMaker over the EC2 instance underneath it, or DynamoDB over a database you run yourself, was always a labour arbitrage. AI coding collapses the labour side of that bargain. When an agent can assemble the orchestrator, inference server, IAM policy and patch cycle from open-source components, the managed margin deflates and what remains is a commodity business bounded by energy. The hyperscalers survive because they also sell liability, brand and a contract. The neoclouds are more exposed: they rent bare GPUs to customers who want the commodity itself. This is a framework note, not an initiation; the companies named are illustrations. No rating.
Framework · AI & Business ModelsThe Winner's Share: Who AI Actually Pays in European Software
Software survives AI by not losing — but survival is only half the trade. The other half is capture: if generative AI deflates the cost of capability while concentrating value onto proprietary substrates — licensed data, systems of record, liquidity pools, settlement rails — then someone owns those substrates, and the repricing that punished the whole software column has mispriced them twice. Europe is where the mispricing is most extreme, because Europe's software champions are, by an accident of industrial history, disproportionately substrate businesses rather than capability businesses. The market imported an American category fear onto a different asset mix. This is a framework note, not an initiation; the companies named are illustrations. No rating.
Framework · AI & Business ModelsThe Loser's Game: Why Software Survives AI by Not Losing
Most of the software complex was repriced in 2025–26 on a single fear: that generative AI collapses the value of capability. The fear is right about capability and wrong about which businesses sell it. The durable franchises in an AI world are not the ones that hit the most brilliant AI product — they are the ones that avoid the one unforced error that ends them. We borrow a fifty-year-old idea from tennis to explain why. This is a framework note, not an initiation; the companies named are illustrations, not recommendations. No rating.
Equity Research · Frankfurt Stock Exchange (Prime Standard); SDAXMedios: Six Quarters of Margin Expansion, Then a Margin Miss
Medios is Germany's largest specialty pharmaceutical distributor and a top-three European specialty pharma platform, with FY2025 revenue of €2.08bn (+10.4%) and EBITDA pre of €93.1m (+17.8%) at a 4.5% margin, expanded 30 basis points year over year. The 2026 guidance — revenue €2.0-2.12bn, EBITDA pre €94-102m at ~4.8% margin — implies continued mid-single-digit organic EBITDA growth and a credible multiple-expansion thesis against Fagron at ~9x forward EV/EBITDA versus Medios' ~4.5x on FY2026 guidance today. The bear case rests on Q1 2026's -7.9% EBITDA pre print, which arrived with a new CEO and CFO on the watch and a capital-markets narrative that the previous regime had not solved. We publish no rating; the question is whether the multiple rerates or the operating trajectory disappoints first.
Equity Research · Euronext Growth MilanCyberoo: The Deadlines Are the Demand
A fiscal year stretched to fifteen months makes every headline growth rate incomparable, and the extra quarter added almost nothing: on the company's own like-for-like figures, the January–March 2026 stub contributed roughly €1.7m of cybersecurity revenue against a 2025 monthly average of about the same. Underneath, monthly EBITDA fell by roughly 30% while margin dropped eleven points. The genuine news is working capital — receivables from the largest shareholder fell from €11.5m to €2.6m — but €5.3m of that left by offset rather than cash, and an unconsolidated leasing subsidiary with a €15m facility now sits beside the group's receivables machinery. No rating.
Equity Research · Vienna Stock Exchange (direct market plus); Munich m:accessWolftank Group: Remediation, Above and Below the Line
The 2026 turnaround narrative rests on a 2025 base year whose reported profit was produced by an internal revaluation; the operating business lost roughly €3m, minority shareholders own the profitable half of the group, and €27.7m of bank debt matures within twelve months. Against that: a genuinely strong Q1 and an order backlog whose arithmetic raises a €40m question.