From a specialized financial tool to a driver of growth and international expansion: Over the past twenty years, Italian private equity (PE) has undergone a profound transformation, becoming an accelerator of professional management, a catalyst for industrial consolidation, and a force vehicle enabling access to Italy's family-owned capitalism.
But the journey has been anything but a straight road. The 2008 financial crisis, the sovereign debt crisis, a decade of near-zero interest rates, the pandemic, and more recent geopolitical tensions: all these contingencies could have brought down a more fragile industry. Instead, each challenge left Italian PE stronger than before.
Within this broader evolution, and along this timeline, the story unfolds of the PE Lab (Private Equity and Finance for Growth). In recent weeks, the Lab celebrated its twentieth anniversary.
A few market figures illustrate the trend. Since 2005, PE has grown at a compound annual rate of 9.6%, reaching a record 747 deals in 2025 (up from 647 the previous year), while exits doubled during the same year. Alongside this quantitative growth, the nature of transactions has also changed, with a remarkable upsurge in add-on acquisitions, a hallmark of Buy&Build strategies. (A Buy&Build strategy involves a fund acquiring a platform company and strengthening it through a series of subsequent acquisitions—known as add-ons—to build a larger, integrated, more competitive group that will ultimately be more attractive at exit.)
From a bank-centered market to a capital ecosystem
Until a few years ago, the market was, in the words of the people working there, essentially bank-centered: Companies financed their growth through bank lending, with financial institutions serving as their sole point of reference.
Today, the picture is very different. Italian entrepreneurial families, once reluctant to open their ownership to outside investors, are now doing so with a willingness that the market sometimes struggles to absorb. The opportunities are still plentiful because, as Marco Piana and Lorenzo Stanca observe, Italy is still "the country of private capital," with vast untapped potential among companies that either cannot or choose not to go public, while a generational transition is approaching for many family-owned businesses.
Industrial consolidation, driven by Buy&Build strategies, has become the defining feature of today's market. Since 2023, the number of add-on acquisitions has exceeded initial investments, with platform acquisitions and subsequent deals often planned—and sometimes executed—from the outset as parts of a single industrial project.
New instruments, new sources of capital
At the same time, the way Italian companies finance their growth is also changing. The financial toolbox continues to expand, giving entrepreneurs a broader range of options. Private debt, which developed later in Italy than in the rest of Europe, has accelerated in recent years, bringing with it increasingly customized solutions: hybrid capital, preferred equity, and minority-shareholder financing designed for entrepreneurs seeking a growth partner without relinquishing control. As Beatrice Tamburi puts it, there is no universally right or wrong answer. There is only the instrument best suited to the stage a company has reached—a genuine alternative to both traditional bank financing and conventional majority private equity.
Finding the right formula
Ultimately, all the signs point in the same direction: the end of the one-size-fits-all approach. Large buyout funds, which proliferated during years of rising valuation multiples, are now facing a more challenging return environment. Alongside them, evergreen vehicles open to a broader base of investors are gaining ground, as are minority investment structures tailored to entrepreneurs' needs. Even artificial intelligence is no longer viewed as an obscure threat but rather as a competitive advantage for those who know how to use it, according to Andrea De Panfilis and Pietro Zanoni.
Some of the reflections presented in this article were inspired by the discussion held during the conference celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the PE Lab, which featured contributions from Andrea Cacciapaglia, Valter Conca, Andrea De Panfilis, Leo De Rosa, Francesco Di Trapani, Giampaolo Gabbi, Filippo Gaggini, Paola Musile Tanzi, Marco Piana, Lorenzo Stanca, Beatrice Tamburi, and Pietro Zanoni.
