Spotlight on Jacob Van der Wiel, Managing Director, EQT Group
Global Thought Leader Spotlight
Jacob Van der Wiel, Managing Director, EQT Group
In my role as Managing Director at EQT Group, I am responsible for originating and executing mid-market software and technology-enabled services investments in Australia and New Zealand.
At the regional level I lead our coverage of the software sector and work with colleagues across Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, and India to form an integrated sector coverage team.
My key area of focus is identifying opportunities to partner with local or regional technology champions and bring the best of EQT’s global expertise to scale these businesses into global leaders.
Software and technology-enabled services investments
While the impact of A.I. on software has been profound, the anxiety around A.I. has resulted in an indiscriminate sell-off. The reality is far more selective: businesses with genuine moats (proprietary data, deep workflow embeddedness, system-of-record status in regulated or complex niches) will use A.I. to accelerate growth and expand margins, while thinly differentiated horizontal tools face real erosion. When a heterogeneous asset class is priced as one, entry valuations disconnect from asset quality, and disciplined selection becomes the primary return driver.
We are also increasingly seeing software and services converging. As A.I. enables software to deliver completed units of work (invoices processed, compliance queries answered, transactions reconciled) rather than simply tooling human users, the boundary between the two categories is dissolving. This opens a two-way opportunity: traditional services businesses can be reimagined digitally, and SaaS businesses can extend into managed services, monetising the much larger pool of adjacent services spend and pricing on outcomes delivered.
The economics of the A.I. paradigm shift are still evolving as token economics rewrite traditional software P&Ls. Inference introduces a genuine variable cost into a historically fixed-cost, high-gross-margin model, just as pricing shifts from per-seat licences, toward consumption and outcomes. Offsetting this, open-source and capable sub-frontier models are driving competition that commoditises intelligence, making A.I. easier and lower risk to embed in product. While the steady-state margin profile of an A.I.-enabled software company is still being established, it is clear that the pricing models of the future will more closely align with value delivered rather than simply passing through inference costs.
Opportunities for sophisticated investors
We believe the answer is not avoiding A.I.-impacted markets but being deliberate about how exposure is taken.
First, diversification is essential given the dislocation occurring across markets, but it tends to work only if it is maintained when a sector is out of favour; indiscriminate selling is often what creates the opportunity. Software is currently being repriced as a single asset class despite wide dispersion in underlying quality. For shrewd investors, vintages deployed into that dislocation may prove well timed as the shakeout separates durable businesses from disrupted ones.
Second, manager selection has rarely mattered more. Where investors are allocating to software and technology, investing with sponsors that have genuine sector expertise is critical. Managers with that depth and global scale have the resources to separate A.I. winners from losers and to build repeatable frameworks for doing so. Those already meaningfully invested in the sector are best positioned to distinguish the moats that are generating enduring value in software and the best practices companies are using to leverage A.I. for value creation.
Third, we would favour ownership models built for agility and pace, and we see the mid-market as a sweet spot. Mid-market businesses tend to be nimble enough to re-platform around A.I. in quarters rather than years, yet established enough to own the proprietary data and customer relationships worth defending. Control-focused sponsors with an active ownership approach can recruit talent, drive A.I. deployment with urgency, and share playbooks across a portfolio.
Jacob will be presenting at Global Investment Institute’s upcoming Family Office Investment Forum on Tuesday, 1 September 2026 in Melbourne CBD, Victoria. To register your interest in attending, click here or for more information email zlatan@globalii.com.au.
Jacob Van der Wiel, Managing Director, EQT Group
Jacob Van der Wiel is a Managing Director at EQT Group in the firm’s Private Capital Asia business. He leads EQT’s software coverage across APAC and is responsible for originating and executing mid-market technology and tech-enabled services investments.
Jacob is based in Sydney, Australia and works with the firm’s investments in PropertyMe, Compass Education, Quantios, and PageUp. Prior to joining EQT, he worked for a technology-focused private equity sponsor in the US.
Jacob obtained his Bachelor of Arts degrees in Accounting and Chinese Language from The University of Texas at Austin.
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