Doxis is actively evaluating acquisitions but does not intend to pursue a software roll-up strategy, CEO John Bates said.

The Germany-based document intelligence company, formerly known as SER Group and backed by TA Associates and Carlyle, favors transactions ranging from capability-led acquisitions to potentially much larger strategic combinations, Bates said.

“We don’t really want to do roll-ups,” he said. “We want to bring things in that accelerate our mission and strengthen our story.”

Doxis continues to see companies generating roughly USD 5m–USD 30m in annual revenue as a suitable range for additive acquisitions, he said. However, the company would consider targets of virtually any size where there is a compelling strategic rationale, including a substantially larger transaction bringing two market leaders together, he said.

At the other end of the spectrum, Doxis is reluctant to pursue very small acquisitions because they can require similar management and integration effort without producing enough strategic benefit, Bates said. Potential targets should ideally not be margin dilutive, he said. Product, culture, people and customers are the most important screening criteria.

Doxis looks for businesses whose customers fit its ideal customer profile and could buy additional capabilities across the broader document intelligence platform, while also seeking products that can be sold into Doxis’s existing customer base.

The company also places weight on the willingness of acquired teams to remain involved in the business following a transaction, Bates said. Doxis has leaned toward businesses whose teams want to participate in a broader platform rather than owners seeking simply to build and sell a company before exiting completely.

Recent transactions illustrate three types of acquisition that remain relevant to its strategy. The company can acquire businesses that deepen an existing capability, add functionality directly to the Doxis platform, or bring in solution businesses that use and extend the platform in specific areas, he said.

Netherlands-based Klippa deepened Doxis’s intelligent document processing capabilities and brought in an AI-native engineering team alongside a customer base that offers cross-selling and upselling opportunities, Bates said. Germany-based AFI Solutions added further depth around SAP-related purchase-to-pay and order-to-cash document processes. Sweden-based Metaforce added customer communication management and customer interaction management capabilities, particularly in banking and insurance, expanding Doxis’s ability to generate, distribute and manage customer documents as part of a wider workflow.

Doxis does not want to depart from its core document intelligence strategy through acquisitions, Bates said. Instead, deals need to strengthen or broaden an end-to-end platform covering document understanding, process automation, storage, search, generation and communication.

TA Associates is directly involved in supporting Doxis’s acquisition strategy, including helping management identify targets and participating in due diligence, Bates said. TA and Carlyle can also introduce subject-matter experts where Doxis wants outside advice on a particular strategic or technical question, he said.

Doxis normally engages investment banks for its M&A processes, Bates said. Baird advised Doxis on its previous own investment process, while Goodwin is the company’s principal law firm, he said.

Doxis also works with local legal advisers when it requires jurisdiction-specific or employment advice.

The US remains an important hunting ground for future acquisitions and is currently Doxis’s strongest geography for new business, as well as the market where it is growing fastest, Bates said.

“The US is still an area of extreme importance to us,” he said. The company is open to targets across the US rather than favoring one coast or region. Europe also remains relevant and has not been deprioritized. Doxis’s recent concentration of acquisitions there was not the result of a deliberate geographic strategy, but reflected where the best-fitting businesses happened to be available, Bates said. Potential targets can be private equity-backed or founder and family-owned.

Germany and Europe more broadly still have a significant population of owner-run software businesses, creating opportunities where founders are approaching retirement or believe they have taken a company as far as they can independently, Bates said. Such transactions can also work where entrepreneurs want to remain involved and use Doxis as a platform for further international growth, provided there is sufficient cultural fit, he said. Bates pointed in particular to the difficulty some European software businesses have in expanding beyond their domestic or DACH markets.

Build versus buy

Doxis is also weighing acquisition opportunities against its ability to develop emerging capabilities internally, particularly in AI, Bates said. “Sometimes it can be quicker to build things yourself,” he said.

Doxis developed its AI-powered Superhuman Search and Ask Doxis capabilities internally after determining that it could not find suitable technology to acquire, Bates said. That buy-versus-build test is becoming increasingly relevant as software companies reassess the impact of large language models and generative AI, he said.

Bates described the early part of 2026 as a period in which customers and investors questioned whether increasingly capable LLMs could reduce the need for conventional software platforms. Subsequent experience has shifted the discussion toward the value of the software infrastructure and governance wrapped around an underlying model, he said. “There’s a lot more value in the harness around an LLM than in the LLM itself,” Bates said.

Companies are increasingly focused on whether AI investment generates measurable business value, as well as issues including hallucinations, deterministic outputs, security, data governance, and the cost of running models at scale, he said. Doxis allows customers to use different underlying AI models while applying its own governance, retrieval and security framework, and can dynamically select models depending on the task and cost, Bates said. Managing AI consumption costs will become “a new frontier” for businesses processing large volumes of documents, he added.

Cap table 

There are no imminent plans for another sale or refinancing, Bates said. TA became Doxis’s lead investor in 2024, with Carlyle reinvesting alongside it, leaving the company roughly two years into the current private equity investment cycle. “At the moment, we’re just getting on with execution,” Bates said.

Private equity ownership changes can arise at the appropriate point in an investment cycle, but Doxis is not there yet, he said. An IPO remains a longer-term option but is not expected in the near term.

Bates said he would personally like to take a company public and that Doxis CFO Johannes Klutz shares that ambition, but management is not currently preparing a listing.

“Could it happen within the next five years? Yeah, potentially,” Bates said. “But I don’t think it’s going to happen within the next two years.”