What does it take to build a SaaS leader in Europe today?
For Skeepers, the self-proclaimed European leader of customer engagement solutions, the answer lies in timing, M&A precision, and a U.S. investor betting big on Europe’s slower adoption of customer-centric tech.
Born from a buy-and-build strategy, the company was engineered by Providence Strategic Growth (PSG), a U.S. growth equity firm that acquired the Marseille-based startup Avis Vérifiés in 2019 as its cornerstone.
Founded in 2012 by Olivier Mouillet, Laurent Abisset, and Tom Brami, Avis Vérifiés was France’s leading customer review platform that enabled companies to publish authentic customer reviews to build trust amongst future and potential clients.
Over the following years, PSG stitched together a portfolio of complementary European startups, appointing Avis Vérifiés’ founder Olivier Mouillet as CEO of the new entity: Skeepers in 2019.
From a Marseille-based startup to a European platform
"Avis Vérifiés was our starting point, but the vision was always broader," said new CEO Marc Bonnamour, who joined Skeepers in 2021 to head up the company’s integration and growth.
Since then, Skeepers has acquired seven more companies across Europe, spanning everything from influencer marketing to live shopping to customer insight tools.
Today, the group counts 550 employees and 8,000 clients in 40 countries.
Skeepers offers a unified platform that helps brands manage the full cycle of customer engagement and user-generated content. The tools allow companies to gather authentic feedback, activate communities and influencers, and analyze the impact of that content across marketing channels. At its core, the platform supports:
- Verified Reviews & Feedback Management: this involves collecting authentic text, photo, or video reviews directly from customers, tweaking them with AI-powered tools, and syndicating these reviews across websites and partner channels to boost SEO and trust.
- Influencer Marketing & Gifted Reviews: the aim being to connect brands with a curated community of micro- and nano-influencers, manage gifting workflows end-to-end, and track campaign performance - all via an AI-enabled interface.
- Brand Community Platform: this allows clients to create bespoke communities - white-labeled and gamified - for advocacy, product testing, missions, and ambassador programs to engage high-value customers and generate UGC.
- Live Shopping Events: this is Skeeper’s latest offering: live-shopping sessions with influencers or experts, featuring real-time chat, promo codes, and replays integrated with product catalogs, according to the company it results in up to 2× conversion and retention rates.
- Shoppable Content & Syndication: this allows clients to render UGC, influencer videos, and live-shop replays shoppable by embedding them directly on product pages with “add to cart” buttons, and distribute content across touchpoints for broader reach.
- AI Tools & Analytics: automated review moderation, conversational analysis, multilingual capabilities, thematic summarization, and creator matching. Brands benefit from actionable insights through dashboards and real-time performance metrics.
These different offerings are integrated into a single platform, giving brands a centralized way to collect customer reviews, engage with influencers and brand advocates, host live shopping events, and analyze performance. The aim is to help companies streamline their customer engagement strategy—particularly around user-generated content, all while making it easier to turn that content into actionable insights or sales.
Buy and Build, the European Way
Skeepers’ model follows a classic private equity playbook more common in the United States: acquire complementary startups and integrate them under a unified brand.
The strategy behind Skeepers was built on a clear market insight: while customer engagement, user-generated content (UGC), and loyalty strategies have long been deeply embedded in U.S. brand and marketing playbooks for decades, many European companies are still catching up. “France - and Southern Europe in particular - aren’t exactly known for their customer experience culture,” Bonnamour noted. “That’s where the opportunity lies...We’re starting to see more customer loyalty startups emerge in Europe, but most focus on just one aspect of the customer experience. Skeepers brings all those elements together, offering a multi-modal solution that better aligns with our clients’ evolving needs.”
Skeepers is positioning itself as the connective tissue by bringing structure and scale to what has been a fragmented market.
If the idea and the funding are American, for Bonnamour the execution is decidedly European. "Our shareholder is American, but our investor team is based in London and the fund doesn’t play an active role in the day-to-day running of the company. The DNA of the company is very much European," says Bonnamour.
Product, Profitability, and Pragmatism
Despite its growth ambitions, Skeepers has prioritized profitability over blitzscaling. "We’ve been profitable since 2023, and that remains a key focus," said Bonnamour. "It’s about growing in a sustainable and meaningful way."
That growth includes a clear focus on innovation. Recent moves include the acquisition of Talkie Walkie, a startup that helps brands mobilize their most engaged customers as ambassadors. Through gamified missions and rewards, brands like L'Oréal are now using the platform to generate large-scale, authentic content.
AI is also playing a bigger role. Skeepers is investing in tools that synthesize customer reviews into SEO-rich summaries and allow brands to better analyze feedback. "Our clients are looking for productivity. AI helps us deliver more value, faster," noted Bonnamour.
A European Engine with Global Awareness
While the U.S. remains a small part of Skeepers' business, the company is watching the regulatory landscape carefully. From TikTok bans to evolving attitudes around diversity, U.S. policy shifts often ripple across borders. "Some of our clients are impacted, especially in cosmetics and consumer goods," Bonnamour said. "But for us, it's mostly about being resilient and adaptable."
Skeepers has a modest presence in New York and maintains niche activities in Canada and Brazil. But the company is not planning a U.S. expansion. "The U.S. market is too big and too mature for our current offering. Europe is still full of opportunities," he explained.
Culture as a Product
With offices in five countries and teams across time zones, building a cohesive culture has been a deliberate effort. Skeepers operates with English as its working language, relies heavily on remote collaboration, and convenes its 50+ managers regularly for strategy and alignment.
"We have 10 different company cultures to unify. Our rituals and management style are what tie us together," Bonnamour said. Authenticity, both as a brand value and a management principle, remains central.
What’s Next?
Geographic expansion across continental Europe is on the roadmap, with a specific interest in Germany and northern markets. On the product side, Skeepers plans to deepen its AI capabilities and further integrate its suite into a seamless platform.
As many SaaS startups tighten their belts, Skeepers is a case study in cross-border consolidation and pragmatic growth. Its bet on Europe’s slower adoption of user-generated content tools may not yet be proven, but it’s a strategy that merits attention.
"We’re not chasing vanity metrics," Bonnamour said. We want to create lasting value for our clients, our teams, and our shareholders."
