Alixio, an HR transformation consulting group with more than 500 consultants, is adding new skills in a context of major regulatory changes in professional training. The management team of Develop’Invest remains heavily involved in order to deploy its service offering to its key account customers.
Founded in 2002 by Stéphane Martin, Develop’Invest addresses all the needs of large companies in terms of managing professional training. The group supports its customers in all their training and skills development needs: partial or total outsourcing of professional training, advice in the development of training plans, provision of management software and optimisation of training purchases. Develop’Invest thereby enables its customers to free themselves from administrative constraints and to improve the quality of training while professionalising their management and optimising their budget. Its customer portfolio mainly includes major international groups in the defence, retail, transport and chemicals sectors. Located in Aix-en-Provence and Paris, the group has around fifty employees, some of whom work on site throughout France. It manages nearly €20 million in teaching costs per year and generated revenues of nearly €8 million in 2019, up nearly 20% per year since 2015.
The company’s shareholders mandated the PAX Corporate Finance teams to carry out a process with industrial players in the human resources sector and investment funds. The aim of the transaction was to provide liquidity to Finapère Capital as well as to several business angels that financed the company’s development during a fundraising completed in 2011. The objective was also to enable Develop’Invest to take on a new dimension by joining a player that could multiply its commercial power with large groups. Alixio was therefore selected among several offers at the end of a competitive process.
It is indeed thanks to its very significant proximity with large regional mid-caps and French subsidiaries of multinationals, natural customers of Develop’Invest, that the consulting group founded in 2010 by Raymond Soubie was able to convince the executives to join it. Alixio is present throughout France via 90 permanent offices and more than 500 consultants and is the French leader in HR support for transformations, generating revenues of €100 million in 2019.
Stéphane Martin, founding Chairman of Develop’Invest is investing significantly in the transaction and joins Alixio’s management teams. Company executives were also involved in the transaction.
PAX Corporate Finance thus strengthens its know-how in the human resources and training sectors. The firm recently advised on the sale of Neosphères Consulting to Sopra HR and the opening of the capital of the training company WebForce3.
