RWS values Acolad, a rival with £182m of revenue, at £22.4m

RWS Holdings, the AIM-listed AI and language company, said on 2 November that it had completed its acquisition of Acogroup, the parent of Acolad. The deal, agreed on 3 August, values Acolad at an enterprise value of £22.4m. Acolad made revenue of £182m and adjusted EBITDA of £13m in 2025, employs about 1,200 people and operates in 22 countries across Europe and North America, according to RWS.

Completion followed French regulatory clearance and a consultation with works councils inside the Acolad group. RWS says it will report on the integration with its full-year results in December.

RWS is paying about 12p for each £1 of Acolad’s 2025 revenue, and it puts the enterprise value at 2x the adjusted EBITDA it expects Acolad to make in RWS’s financial year to 30 September 2027. The total consideration is £40.2m, which includes about £17.8m for cash on Acolad’s balance sheet at completion. RWS also bought all the outstanding bonds issued by an Acolad subsidiary and held by funds managed or advised by Barings; they become a debt owed within the RWS group, and RWS says no third-party debt comes with the deal. RWS put Acolad’s gross assets at £404m at the end of 2025.

On those terms RWS is not paying for Acolad’s translation revenue as a dependable stream of future profit. What it has bought is access: long-standing relationships with large European companies, including about half of the CAC 40, according to RWS, and it plans to bring its own AI platforms to those clients.

A shrinking business at a low price

RWS does not expect Acolad to hold its 2025 revenue. In its own forecast, Acolad contributes annualized revenue of about £155m and adjusted EBITDA of about £11m in the RWS financial year to September 2027, both converted at the same exchange rate as the 2025 figures. That is about 15% less revenue and about 15% less EBITDA than in 2025.

About three-quarters of Acolad’s revenue comes from localization and related services. Interpreting, transcription and other services make up the rest. About half comes from regulated industries, including a medical devices business that RWS says complements its work for pharmaceutical companies.

Acolad joins RWS’s Transform segment, which Benjamin Faes, chief executive of RWS since January 2025, said on 27 October is “moving at pace to AI-led technology”. In that day’s trading statement, RWS said Transform revenue fell by a mid-single-digit percentage on an organic constant currency basis in the year to 30 September 2026, though services “held up well” in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, in Asia-Pacific and with global technology clients. The group as a whole grew: RWS expects reported revenue of about £700m, organic constant currency growth of about 3% and adjusted profit before tax about 9% higher. Its Generate segment grew revenue by double digits on the same basis, led by the TrainAI data business, which works with frontier model developers.

Buying the client list

Faes set out the logic when the deal was agreed. “It significantly expands our enterprise client base, especially in Europe, to which we can bring RWS’s current and next-generation language technology platforms,” he said. “We are already applying AI at scale to expert-led services across our own operations.”

Some of the products RWS plans to sell into that base are new. Language Weaver Pro, built with Cohere, launched in March, and RWS says its next-generation translation management platform launches in November. RWS has also said it intends to offer Acolad’s clients its Generate and Protect products, and that Acolad adds interpreting to its portfolio.

Bertrand Gstalder, chief executive of Acolad, said in August that Acolad had been built to help large organizations grow by pairing technology “with deep human expertise”. RWS now owns those relationships and the staff who serve them.

What the purchase costs RWS

RWS is paying from existing borrowing facilities, which it refinanced in October 2025. It reported net debt of about £38m at the end of September 2026, after paying £16.5m upfront for Obviously Group, the brand protection business it bought during the year. The £40.2m Acolad consideration is larger than that net debt figure, though about £17.8m of it pays for cash that comes with the business.

On RWS’s forecast, Acolad adds annualized revenue of about £155m to a group with revenue of about £700m, an increase of more than a fifth, and all of it joins Transform, the segment that shrank in the latest year. RWS has not yet set out what the integration means for Acolad’s roughly 1,200 staff; it has said it will give an update with its results on 15 December.

Acolad was founded in 1995 and spent three decades building relationships with some of Europe’s largest companies. RWS bought that business for about two years of its forecast adjusted EBITDA, which leaves the value-creation case RWS made to investors resting on how many of those clients take up its AI platforms.