Building Europe's Industrial Data Platform
IDG partners with independent, founder-owned data and intelligence businesses in European industrial markets, providing the long-term partnership, commercial infrastructure, and operational resources to unlock their next chapter.
Across Europe, there are hundreds of family-owned, independent intelligence businesses that have spent decades becoming the authoritative voice in their commodity niche. They supply pricing benchmarks embedded in thousands of supply contracts. They run producer panels no competitor can replicate. They publish the one newsletter that every procurement manager in their sector actually reads.
These businesses are not broken. They are quietly exceptional, deeply trusted by their markets, and structurally protected by the very nature of proprietary, relationship-sourced data. What they often lack is not ambition, but the commercial infrastructure and operational support to match the scale of the opportunity in front of them.
IDG was built to change that. We partner with these businesses, not to extract value, but to accelerate it. We bring the group-level product, sales, and technology capabilities that each business alone cannot justify building, while preserving the editorial independence, brand identity, and market relationships that make each business irreplaceable.
We are selective by design. IDG targets a specific type of business: independent, founder-built data and intelligence providers that have earned benchmark status in their niche but remain subscale relative to their opportunity. Six criteria define what we look for.
European headquarters, sub-100 FTE, with revenue between €5 and €15 million. Family-owned or employee-owned. The defining voice in a specific industrial commodity or information vertical.
Data that cannot easily be replicated. Built through give-to-get relationships with market participants, producer interview panels, or physical market research. The kind of data that takes decades to accumulate.
A clear market leader, not number two. The data is embedded as the reference benchmark in its niche, written into supply contracts, cited in industry publications, and trusted by procurement professionals daily.
Subscription or multi-client report models. Revenue underpinned by workflow embeddedness and high switching costs, not project-by-project engagements.
Already a leading, profitable business. IDG is not a turnaround vehicle. We partner with businesses that have a great foundation and the potential for meaningful acceleration.
We look to partner with the person who built the data relationships: a founder, family owner, or operational leader who is committed to staying on post-partnership to protect and grow what they built.
We understand what it means to have built a business over decades: the customer relationships, the editorial credibility, the institutional trust that cannot be manufactured or acquired. When we partner with a business, our commitment is straightforward. We preserve what makes it exceptional, and invest in what will make it larger.
IDG is structured as a permanent home, not a fund with an exit horizon. We think in decades, not deal cycles. Our goal is to build the European industrial data platform of lasting significance, and that requires patient, compounding partnerships rather than financial engineering.
We bring a shared commercial and product infrastructure that each portfolio business plugs into: a central sales capability, modern data delivery and API layer, AI-native product development, and back-office consolidation. These are capabilities that no individual business of our size can justify building alone.
Your brand stays yours. Your editorial voice stays yours. Your customer relationships stay yours. The people who hold the institutional knowledge and market relationships are the value of the business, and we structure our partnerships to retain, incentivise, and develop them for the long term.
If you are thinking about the next chapter for your business and want a partner who understands what you have built, we would like to talk.
Start a Conversation →IDG focuses on data and intelligence businesses serving physical industrial and commodity markets. These are sectors where proprietary pricing data, capacity intelligence, and market research remain genuinely scarce, and where the businesses that own them are often family-run, independent, and deeply undervalued relative to their strategic importance.
We start with a straightforward conversation. We want to understand your business, your vision, and what you would want from a long-term partner. There is no pressure, no information memorandum required, and no bankers in the room. Just a direct conversation between people who take this work seriously.
info@industrialdatagroup.comMunich · London