The Buy & Boost approach was not developed on the drawing board, but emerged from hands-on work with mid-sized companies across 12 projects over the past five years. It was initially developed in the context of private equity portfolios—where time, capital discipline, and measurable value creation are particularly critical—as well as in mid-market companies that rely on technology-driven innovation with rapid market impact.
At the same time, these practical projects showed that the underlying logic extends far beyond private equity. Many family-owned businesses face the same challenge of bringing innovations to market more quickly without overburdening their organizations or taking on excessive risk. Buy & Boost addresses precisely this tension—regardless of whether growth is pursued with or without a financial investor.
Private equity today faces a paradox
Never before has the toolkit for operational value creation been so sophisticated—yet never has the pressure on time, multiple expansion, and a compelling exit story been greater.
Buy & Improve, Buy & Build, and professional post-merger integration are well established across the market. In parallel, many PE organizations have built dedicated value creation teams tasked with identifying and realizing synergies across portfolio companies. At the same time, an increasing number of portfolio companies have installed M&A managers or corporate development functions to systematically drive inorganic growth and diversification.
At the same time, a familiar tension can be observed in mid-market companies in practice:
Many innovation managers continue to pursue internal development projects even though start-ups or specialized technology companies have already developed comparable solutions. Internal development processes, however, are often time-consuming, capital-intensive, and organizationally complex—making them significantly slower than integrating external, market-proven technologies.
This observation is not limited to private equity portfolios. Entrepreneurially drivenfamily-owned businesses face the same challenge: advancing innovation without fundamentally restructuring their existing organizations. It is precisely out of this tension that the Buy & Boost approach emerged.
The term was developed and shaped by Julian von der Neyen and Heiko Seif through numerous hands-on projects — as a structured response to the question of how external technology capabilities can be leveraged faster, with lower risk, and with measurable value creation in mid-sized companies.
Buy & Boost complements — it does not replace
Buy & Boost is not an alternative to Buy & Build, but its logical acceleration.
While value creation teams at the fund level identify synergies across the portfolio, M&A managers structure inorganic growth, and innovation leaders drive internal initiatives, Buy & Boost addresses an additional lever: fast external value creation beyond classical acquisitions and internal development logic.
The approach is pragmatic:
Instead of building technology capabilities exclusively in-house or integrating them through full acquisitions, selected external technology partners are deliberately connected to portfolio companies — through partnerships, joint ventures, or selective minority investments.
The focus is on measurable impact for horizontal and vertical market expansion, as demonstrated across 12 projects:
- Additional revenue between +18% and +32%, combined with 10× more strategic growth options
- Increased synergies across portfolio companies through the multiple use of shared technologies, with 2 to 5 companies benefiting simultaneously, depending on the PE portfolio
- A credible, future-oriented equity story leading to value uplift of up to 50% for technology companies, up to 20% for mid-market companies, and up to 25% at the PE portfolio level
Speed as a critical success factor
Empirical market observations show that a significant share of value creation must be realized early in the holding period. At the same time, classical buy-and-build strategies absorb substantial management capacity — particularly when multiple integrations are executed in parallel across platform structures.
Buy & Boost addresses this challenge directly:
- no immediate acquisition,
- no post-merger integration (PMI) risks,
- no early capital commitment.
New business fields are developed in parallel to the core business, not through restructuring existing organizations, but through intelligent complementarity. Partnerships can start small, scale iteratively, and—if strategically justified—evolve into joint ventures or acquisitions. Across most projects, time-to-market was reduced to one third.
Buy & Boost as an additional lever for value creation teams
For fund-level value creation teams, Buy & Boost provides a scalable mechanism to realize technology-driven synergies across the portfolio — without turning every initiative into a classical M&A transaction or an internal development program.
For M&A managers and innovation leaders within portfolio companies, Buy & Boost creates an upstream testing and learning phase:
Technologies, business models, and partners can be validated under real market conditions before capital is committed or long-term organizational decisions are made. Across the projects, both the monetary effort (risk exposure) and investment risk (flop rate) were reduced to well below 75%.
As a result, Buy & Boost functions as a risk-minimizing speed layer on top of existing value creation structures.
Connecting Private Equity Logic, Entrepreneurship, and Technology
The development of Buy & Boost is closely linked to the work of Alpha Build. As managing directors of Alpha Build GmbH, Julian von der Neyen and Heiko Seif combine hands-on private equity logic with access to technology ecosystems, start-ups, and scale-ups.
Rather than relying exclusively on traditional M&A pathways or internal development programs, targeted partnerships with external technology providers are established — flexible, scalable, and value-driven.
The approach follows three core principles:
- Flexibility: ranging from venture-client projects to joint ventures or equity participations.
- Option instead of obligation: partnerships can be deepened—but do not have to be.
- Skin in the game: advisory, execution, and—where appropriate—co-investments are tightly integrated.
Conclusion: Not an Innovation Approach, but a Value Accelerator
Buy & Boost is not just another innovation concept.
It is a shortcut to rapid value creation in the mid-market — developed from hands-on experience at the intersection of private equity, entrepreneurship, and technology.
Buy & Boost is not a private equity special case, but a mid-market model: for private equity firms and family-owned businesses that do not merely manage innovation and new business initiatives, but aim to realize them quickly.
