Visma

Formed in Norway in 1996 through a merger of software companies, it has grown almost entirely by acquisition since – several hundred of them, often small national vendors that kept their own brand under the Visma umbrella. Anyone who has run payroll at a Swedish municipality or invoiced from a small limited company has probably been a customer without knowing it.

The business is boring in a profitable way: accounting follows national law, so every country needs its own code, and nobody changes payroll systems for fun. Through the 2010s the products moved steadily to the cloud as SaaS. The owners have been private equity firms, today chiefly Hg.