What Nordic Dealmakers Say About AI Resilience: "Build Less. Defend More."
AI isn't changing how companies work. It's changing what makes them worth anything.
The most important question in a deal room right now is not about revenue multiples or growth rates. It is not even about the product. It is simpler and more uncomfortable than that: is this company resilient enough to still be worth something in three years?
The death of fake flexibility. The race to protect moats before the window closes. And why the bottleneck in most companies has already moved – and most leaders haven’t caught up.
Our co-founder and CEO Rasmus Møller-Nielsen sat down with Kirsten Vedel Hofmeister, Investment Director at GRO, Allan J. Vestergaard, board member and investor, and Katrine Folkersen, Partner at Erevena, to dig into what they are seeing from deal rooms, portfolios, and the boards they sit on.
From five percent to thirty
Rasmus Møller-Nielsen, CEO and co-founder of Lab08, opened with a recent number shared by Carnegie. Technology risk used to account for around five percent of total deal assessment. In the last six months, that figure had moved to somewhere between twenty-five and thirty percent.
It’s a testament to AI being much more than tech. It’s basically impacting everything around the deal.
Not a valuation boost, but a survival test
Kirsten Vedel Hofmeister, Investment Director at GRO – the private equity firm with €1.2 billion under management, backing B2B software companies across the Nordics and Europe – put it more starkly. For her, AI is not a valuation boost. It is a survival test.
“It’s either companies get sold or they don’t,” she said. “And those that get sold tend to be resilient.”
In the private markets, the question is no longer whether a company will achieve a two-times or three-times return. The question is whether it is sellable at all.
What determines that? Increasingly, it comes down to what investors and advisors call moats – the structural advantages that make a company defensible regardless of what the technology landscape looks like in eighteen months. These are not product features. They are the deeper assets that remain valuable even when the software itself can be replicated or replaced: proprietary data that no one else holds, domain knowledge that took years to accumulate, deep customer relationships and integrations embedded into how clients actually work, and in some cases, regulatory protection that competitors cannot easily access.
If it’s not resilient, if it’s not going to have a viable route to growth in the future, then it’s simply not worth a lot.
Nine to twelve months to protect the moat
Allan J. Vestergaard, sell-side transaction manager, board member and investor, pushed the point further. One of the few people in the room who watched the dot-com era unfold from the inside – as CEO of the company that sold CoCom to Cisco in 1999 – he has seen what it looks like when technology genuinely reshapes everything. The companies he works with have moats. The problem can be whether or not they are moving fast enough to protect them.
They only have about nine to twelve months to protect those moats. So better hurry.
His advice to anyone with a portfolio company sitting on genuine structural advantages was unambiguous: do not sprinkle AI across the organisation and call it a transformation.
The importance is the depth of the AI. You get depth by creating a digital system of those processes that you want AI to run. Don’t think you can take the legacy systems and sprinkle AI over those. Waste of money.
The bottleneck has moved
The bottleneck in most companies has already moved, and many leaders have not caught up with where it now sits. Rasmus described it from direct experience. When his first company was building a product, he would brief the engineers, hand them a scope, and have a quarter to get on with everything else before the product came back. Now, he gives the brief and an hour later the development team is back asking what comes next.
You feel like you have superpowers, but it also creates a lot of anxiety and a need for using that superpower before your competitors do.
Kirsten Vedel Hofmeister confirmed the same pattern inside GRO’s portfolio. Development capacity has gone through the roof, she said, but it is creating bottlenecks elsewhere – specifically in product management, where the people responsible for translating customer needs into what actually gets built simply cannot keep up with the pace of what is being produced. The constraint used to be how fast engineers could build. Now it is whether anyone in the organisation actually knows what to build and why.
Leaner organisations, built on expertise
That shift has direct consequences for how companies are structured and for how investors think about where to deploy capital. Kirsten Vedel Hofmeister was frank: when a CEO comes to her now wanting to hire a layer of middle management, it is not an easy sell. Allan J. Vestergaard went further, drawing on Ronald Coase’s Nobel Prize-winning observation from 1937 that organisations exist because they lower transaction costs. When those coordination costs approach zero because agents are doing the work, the logic of large hierarchical organisations starts to dissolve.
“We’ll see many, many smaller companies, leaner companies compared to revenue size,” he said, “simply because you’ll be able to coordinate much, much more.” What replaces the hierarchy is not chaos but expertise. “I do see organisations that move away from hierarchies to becoming an agentic-centric system of expertise.”
A different kind of leader
For Katrine Folkersen, Partner at Erevena – the global executive search advisor to the world’s most ambitious technology companies, working with everyone from Anthropic and Mistral AI to the growth funds and PE firms backing them – the leadership implication is already visible in the profiles of candidates she is being asked to find. The traditional leader asks how AI can enable the current product and current processes. The leaders who are genuinely ahead ask a different question: given that AI is changing the economics of our entire industry, what does our business actually need to look like?
It becomes a lot more about how are we experimenting and testing and navigating the unknowns, and scaling up what works to ultimately navigate this market.
Interestingly, she pointed out that even the most AI-native companies are not necessarily hiring for AI expertise at the commercial level. Anthropic, she noted, has brought in senior people from companies like ServiceNow and Google. It’s not because they grew up in an AI-native world, but because they are smart, close to customers, and capable of solving problems in real time. The parallel with Snowflake was striking: four times the revenue, twelve times smaller in commercial headcount.
“It’s a lot more about hiring smart people that are close to the customers that will solve the problem in real time,” she explained.
More deals, shorter life cycles
On the question of whether all of this means more or fewer transactions, the panel was in agreement: more. Allan’s reasoning was structural. More companies will form. Life cycles will be shorter. Companies will either fail quickly or grow into something worth acquiring.
Entrepreneurship is really back in the loop again.
Kirsten Vedel Hofmeister added that activity will be concentrated in specific sectors moving fast through AI-driven change, like radiology within health tech, before settling down as those markets mature. The deal flow will be less concentrated in large-cap buyouts and more distributed across smaller, faster-moving segments.
The investor’s new job
What ties all of this together is a shift in what the role of an investor or advisor actually is. The playbook used to involve helping companies understand their ROI, sharpen their pricing, and scale their teams. That work has not disappeared, but it is no longer sufficient.
The new job, as Allan J. Vestergaard framed it, is to help companies understand and protect their moats, and then make sure AI is embedded in depth, not scattered across the surface.
You need to design it over again. And you can do that because you have the capital power to do it.
The companies that get this and are moving fast, protecting what is genuinely defensible, and building with depth rather than breadth – they will be the ones that are still worth something when the market comes around to asking. The ones that are not doing this work right now are running out of time to even start.