Oakley Capital, a London-based private equity firm, is acquiring a controlling stake in Graphwise, the company we knew until recently as Ontotext. The deal value hasn't been disclosed, but sources quoted by Capital value the company at more than EUR 200 million. For Bulgaria's tech sector, it is one of the most significant deals of the year.
From Ontotext to Graphwise
- 2000. Ontotext is founded within Sirma Group Holding.
- 2022. A consortium led by Integral Capital Group buys a majority stake and spins the company out of Sirma. The entry valuation is around EUR 30 million, plus EUR 11 million of new capital.
- 2024. A merger with Austria's Semantic Web Company and a new name, Graphwise. Market sources value the combined company at EUR 70-100 million.
- 2026. Oakley Capital comes in as the controlling owner.
The sellers are the Integral consortium, which includes PortfoLion Capital Partners, Carpathian Partners and the EBRD. Atanas Kiryakov, co-founder and president, remains a shareholder and continues to run the company with his team.
Why data has become a strategic asset
Graphwise works in knowledge graphs and semantic technology, in other words how organisations connect and make sense of their own data. Oakley founder Peter Dubens describes the company as a data and knowledge management platform for the AI era. The logic is clear: large language models are only as useful as the quality and structure of the data they're given.
The company has around 200 employees, just over half of them in Bulgaria. Ontotext's latest reported results, for 2024, show revenue of around EUR 9.2 million. The plan is to accelerate growth over the next 3-4 years through acquisitions and hiring technical talent.
The link to websites and SEO
This may sound far removed from a company website, but the principle is the same. Search engines and AI systems understand content better when it's structured: clear headings, logical links between pages and structured data (schema) describing who is behind the site and what it offers. Semantics is no longer an academic topic; it's a practical advantage.
Source: Digitalk: A top 3 deal for a Bulgarian IT company (in Bulgarian). This article is an independent analysis by Penkov Studio.
