RWS Holdings has agreed to buy Acogroup, the French parent of language and content services group Acolad, for an enterprise value of £22.4 million (€26.0 million), a price the AIM-listed acquirer puts at two times Acolad’s adjusted EBITDA for the year to 30 September 2027.
The cheque is larger than that figure suggests. RWS will pay total consideration of £40.2 million (€46.6 million), which includes payment for roughly £17.8 million of cash sitting in the business at completion. Strip that out and the enterprise value lands at about an eighth of Acolad’s 2025 revenue: the company generated revenues of £182 million and adjusted EBITDA of £13 million in the year to 31 December 2025.
What RWS is buying at that price
Acolad has real scale. Founded in 1995 and headquartered in the Paris area, it operates across 22 countries in Europe and North America, employs about 1,200 people and counts roughly half the CAC 40 among its clients. Around three-quarters of its revenue comes from localisation and related services, with interpreting, transcription and other work making up the rest. About half of revenues come from regulated industries, including a medical devices practice that sits next to RWS’s pharmaceutical work in life sciences.
RWS expects Acolad to contribute annualised revenue of about £155 million and adjusted EBITDA of about £11 million in its financial year to 30 September 2027. Gross assets stood at £404 million at the end of 2025.
The structure is where the capital story sits. The buyer is RWS Global Holdings Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary, and the transaction includes acquiring all outstanding bonds issued by V.O. Paris, an Acogroup subsidiary, and held by funds and accounts managed or advised by Barings. Those bonds convert into an obligation inside the RWS group after completion until they are unwound. No third-party debt transfers with the business, and RWS is funding the purchase from existing facilities, having refinanced its revolving credit facility in October 2025.
Acolad’s co-founder and former chief executive, Benjamin du Fraysseix, said in RWS’s announcement that he and his father built the business through more than a dozen European acquisitions after starting it in the 1990s. He said he remains committed to supporting the combination.
Buying a client base
RWS’s case for the deal is distribution. The group plans to push its Cultural Intelligence Layer, its Language Weaver Pro translation product and the next-generation platforms in its Transform segment into Acolad’s accounts, and to open that base to its Generate and Protect lines. Acolad’s interpreting operation is capability RWS did not have.
“Acolad is a strong fit for our existing value creation model,” chief executive Benjamin Faes said in the announcement. “We are already applying AI at scale to expert-led services across our own operations.”
Faes set out his approach to deploying AI across RWS’s services in an interview with Unite.AI in April 2026. The Acolad purchase is a different shape of deal from technology tuck-ins such as Qualcomm’s all-stock acquisition of compiler startup Modular or Nscale’s purchase of Anyscale. RWS is paying for revenue and relationships, and for the chance to run its own software through someone else’s book of business.
It is also RWS’s second acquisition of 2026. In May 2026 the group agreed to buy London-based Obviously Group for £16.5 million in initial cash plus earn-outs of up to £23.5 million, a business with £2.5 million of revenue and a £1.5 million loss in its year to 28 February 2026. Obviously went into RWS’s Protect segment. Acolad goes into Transform.
What happens before completion
French law shapes the timetable. RWS has signed a binding put option with Acogroup’s security holders that obliges it to enter a full sale agreement once two Acogroup subsidiaries finish consulting their works councils, and the sellers have granted RWS exclusivity while that process runs.
Completion also needs clearance from France’s economy and finance ministry, which vets foreign investment in French companies, along with any other foreign-investment authority RWS determines is required. The group expects to complete in the first half of its 2027 financial year at the latest, and the deal is large enough that AIM’s rules class it as a substantial transaction. Until then the two businesses trade separately.
The works-council consultation is the next concrete step. When it closes, RWS is obliged to sign, and Acolad’s 1,200 staff and its interpreting platform move into the Transform segment, where RWS will run its language technology roadmap through them.
