Digital transformation should no longer be perceived as a cost center. For SME and mid-cap leaders, the real challenge of 2026 is to convert their technology investments into strategic assets that multiply their company's valuation.
Published on 2025-11-19 by Nathalie Lamborghini Dumas.
In the privacy of management committees, a frustration recurs: why do some technology companies trade at double-digit revenue multiples, while solid, profitable, historic industrial SMEs struggle to properly value their EBITDA?
The answer lies neither in market injustice nor solely in technological "hype." It lies in the physics of the business model.
The difference between linear and exponential growth
A traditional company operates linearly: to gain 10% more revenue, it often needs to increase costs by 8 or 9%. A platform business orchestrates interactions. It no longer just sells a product: it multiplies exchanges between several groups of actors and captures a portion of the value created in each transaction.
This is the mechanism investors value: not technology per se, but the ability to grow revenues faster than costs.
From technical debt to strategic asset
For many CFOs, AI and Tech remain necessary cost lines to maintain competitiveness. This is a defensive vision. The offensive vision, the one that creates valuation, consists of moving from internal optimization to external monetization.
Take the example of a company that automates its internal document processing. In a classic linear model, these processed documents are "administrative waste." In a platform model, they become structured data deposits. This data, anonymized and aggregated, can feed benchmarking or predictive analysis services sold to the entire ecosystem.
The same reasoning applies to industrial maintenance: an AI-enhanced platform can analyze intervention reports across an entire sector to identify precursor failure patterns, then sell this collective intelligence as a subscription. An operating cost becomes a profit center.
The golden rule is simple: dormant data is a storage cost; data that circulates and enriches itself in an ecosystem is a high-margin revenue stream. Investors don't value your ability to store data, but your ability to transform it into monetizable insights.
Relational capital, the most valuable invisible asset
If platform valuation multiples are so high, it's also because they offer a drastic reduction in commercial risk. In a purely linear model, you must reconquer your customer with every sale. The platform model builds defensive moats based on network effects: the more your customers, suppliers and partners are connected to exchange, the less they want to leave. The switching cost becomes dissuasive, not through contractual constraint, but through operational comfort.
The real value of a platform lies in its ability to mobilize and engage its ecosystem. This relational capital (the set of trust links and operational dependencies you have orchestrated) is almost impossible for a competitor to replicate. It's what allows deploying a portfolio of business models: premium services, commissions on new flows, integrated financing services.
Orchestration rather than ownership
The key metric of the coming years will be capital efficiency. How to generate maximum value with minimum immobilized assets?
This is the strength of orchestration. Airbnb doesn't own rooms, Uber doesn't own cars. Your SME may not need to own all the assets to guarantee service to its customers. By opening your system via APIs, you integrate the assets of third-party partners.
The arrival of agentic AI amplifies this leverage effect. By deploying autonomous agents to handle repetitive tasks, you decouple revenue growth from payroll growth. This hybrid model (platform for external, AI agents for internal) drastically improves operating margin and mechanically propels valuation upward.
Two models that reinforce each other
It's not about abandoning the linear model to switch entirely to the platform. The best-performing companies are often "ambidextrous": they make both logics coexist in synergy.
The historic business (product sales, bespoke service, field expertise) remains the foundation of credibility and immediate revenue. But it also feeds the platform with data, relationships and sector legitimacy. In return, the platform generates network effects that strengthen the attractiveness of the core business: an industrialist who orchestrates a maintenance ecosystem becomes more credible as an equipment supplier; a trader who animates a sector marketplace consolidates their position as a reference.
This hybridization is not a tepid compromise. It's a mutual reinforcement strategy where every euro invested in the platform improves the competitiveness of the linear business, and every linear customer enriches the platform ecosystem. The German group Hagedorn illustrates this approach: its historic recycling and civil engineering activities coexist with digital platforms that connect its ecosystem, creating a virtuous circle of growth.
The urgency to act now
The transition to the platform model is not an IT project. It's a strategy for reconfiguring the value of your company. Studies show that companies that have successfully made this transition see their valuation multiplied by four to ten compared to those that remained on an exclusively linear model.
But the first-mover advantage is real. Data ecosystems tend toward winner-takes-all situations. Those who start now have a two to three year head start.
The question to ask at your next executive committee is not "How much does it cost?" but: which dormant assets in our company (data, connections, expertise, trust) would be worth more than our current business if they were platformed?