Software to drive transformation for the digital enterprise: EQT Growth’s investment in Ardoq
This week, we announced that EQT Growth has led Ardoq’s $125 million Series D, making us Ardoq’s first international investor — you can read the full press release here. Learn more about the company and why EQT Growth looks forward to joining Ardoq’s global expansion story in this piece from EQT Growth’s Victor Englesson and Nils Petter Nygaard.
Led by Co-Founder and CEO Erik Bakstad, Ardoq is an Oslo-based SaaS company that is reinventing Enterprise Architecture (EA) for today’s digital enterprise. Our investment in Ardoq epitomizes our approach perfectly: they are ideally positioned within a fast-growing market supported by the major trends in society, have a best-in-class product, and are led by a passionate, innovative and values-driven management team.
Every business today is undergoing digital transformation in some shape or form. We live in a world of increasing IT complexity, cloud migration, and proliferation of applications — for example, in 2021 companies saw a 40% increase in the average number of apps per employee, compared to a historical growth trajectory of just 20%. As a result, the demand and market for EA platforms like Ardoq is huge and accelerating at pace. Ardoq’s already sizable addressable market is set to grow 10-12% per annum, up from $3.4 billion today.
What is enterprise architecture? The main purpose of EA is to define and coordinate an enterprise’s IT structure to help it achieve its business goals — for example, a company might be looking to undertake a cloud transformation project, where it needs to understand its current application universe, how they interact, and how they can best move it to the cloud. Without software, businesses typically capture the relevant applications in tools like Excel and then leverage presentation tools like Visio to show an output, but this is highly time-consuming and manual process that lends itself to mistakes and quickly goes out of date.
We asked Pietro Casella, EQT’s Chief Architect and formerly of Spotify and KPMG, to explain how Ardoq has reinvented EA. “Modern enterprise architecture functions need to make sense and make decisions based on more complexity than ever before. Ardoq’s cloud-native software makes that job much easier by creating a ‘digital twin’ of its customer’s architecture, which automatically ingests architecture data, makes it easy to curate and organise, provides great visualizations, and can run scenario analysis to decide what needs to be improved,” Pietro said. “But what makes Ardoq standout is the quality of the visualizations and its unique graph based model, which really supercharges the architects’ minds. Its product and vision is truly best-in-class, ranked in top two by Gartner on its critical capabilities scoring, across all use-cases.”
The fundraise is one of the five largest private funding rounds by a Norwegian tech business. It positions Ardoq for global expansion in 2022 and beyond, building on the excellent foundations created in recent years. They will expand the team, continue to invest in the technology platform, and double-down on commercial excellence, all whilst continuing to support the digital business execution of organizations and businesses all across the world.
We are delighted to be joining the Ardoq journey. We look forward to working with Erik and his outstanding team for the long-term, supporting Ardoq with our proprietary software sector value-creation playbook, global network of more than 600 industry advisors, and in-house teams of digitization and sustainability experts.
Are you also interested in joining the journey? Ardoq is hiring, find out more here.
