Memo 2026: A message from Partoo’s co-CEOs

As every year, this memo invites us to pause and revisit the successes and lessons of the past year, while also looking ahead to the challenges and opportunities to come. It is also a moment to step back and gain perspective on the major transformations reshaping our market.

Over the past three years, our environment has changed profoundly. The tech ecosystem crisis has put an end to growth at all costs, our customers are returning to more pragmatic approaches, and artificial intelligence is opening up unprecedented opportunities for innovation in our industry.

On each of these fronts, Partoo has shown its ability to adapt, grow stronger, and innovate. 

Today, we are one of the few European scale-ups that combine profitability, growth, and cutting-edge innovation. We are part of the 0.01% of entrepreneurial projects to reach this level of maturity, and this is something we can be proud of !

After a year of transformation in 2025, 2026 will represent a turning point: one of acceleration and strengthened leadership. Our ambition is clear: generate strong growth, while preserving our long-term profitability. 

With this objective in mind, our 2026 strategy will be structured around three key pillars:

• Moving Upmarket, to support increasingly strategic customers. 
• Strengthening cross-sell, by offering more products and innovations to better support our existing customers. 
• Accelerating our international expansion, by consolidating our key positions and exploring new markets.

To achieve this, we will need to reaffirm our positioning clearly, further reinforcing the uniqueness of our offering while fully harnessing the opportunities brought by artificial intelligence.

We count on each of you to read this memo carefully and to reflect on how you can, both individually and as a team, contribute to the success of these ambitions. It is our ideas, our energy and our ability to move forward together that will make the difference.

Looking back: 2025, a defining year 

1. Apolloo: an international ambition

Partoo’s journey has been shaped by a series of successive strategic plans, each marking a new stage in our development and maturity.

In our early years, our growth was self-funded, with no debt and no fundraising. This demanding model allowed us to lay solid foundations. The entry of the investment fund Fimalac in 2019 marked a major strategic turning point, strengthening our ambitions and leading to the launch of the Apolloo strategic plan in 2020.

This hypergrowth plan was designed to establish Partoo as the undisputed leader in the French market and accelerate abroad. These objectives were achieved: +70% ARR growth in 2022, a leadership position in France, and close to 50% of our revenue now coming from international markets.

In just three years, Partoo went from being a French challenger to becoming one of European leaders – a truly unique trajectory among the top ten players in our market at the time.

2. Hyperion: a successful transformation 

However, this period of hypergrowth did not come without challenges. This is why, at the beginning of 2023, we launched a new strategic plan, Hyperion, built around three major pillars: 

• Escape from the Presence Management image: positioning Partoo as a platform addressing multiple needs, at a time when many still viewed us primarily as a Presence Management player. 
• Increase our addressable market: refocusing on a significant and coherent addressable market where we can genuinely lead. 
• Sustainable growth: returning to profitability while preserving our human values, our ambition and our long-term vision. 

Across each of these pillars, we achieved wins, overcame challenges, and learned a great deal along the way. Looking back, the transformation achieved is considerable.

We have built a robust platform, expanded our product offering and restored healthy financial fundamentals.

Beyond the numbers, we have above all re-centered our focus on our customers, our products, our segments, and our priority markets. This transformation has made us stronger, more aligned and more confident. This renewed momentum is felt every day: in the energy of our teams, in our commercial successes, and in the steady improvement of our internal indicators such as Pulse, with our employee NPS rising from -6 to +21 in just 18 months.

3. A renewed collective momentum

Many major changes marked the past year, and while it would be impossible to list them all here, several stand out: 

• The launch of new strategic projects designed to give our teams a clear direction, including Next League, the WeCare programme, and the Jim Everywhere campaign, which embodies our AI-driven product vision.
• The definition of three customer segments: Key Accounts, Mid-Market and SME. A simpler, clearer and far more scalable approach that allows Sales and CSM teams to be aligned around a single criterion: the number of locations. 
• The arrival of three new Executive Committee members, marking a new phase in our organisational structuring:
  • Julie Cadalen, Chief Customer Officer (CCO),
  • Stéphanie Molle, Chief Financial Officer (CFO),
  • Xavier Artiguebieille, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). 

• Major wins on Channels across Europe, with several strategic contracts signed recently. 
• The success of our new product offerings, starting with Store Locator and the launch of RM+, which opens up new growth opportunities around Reputation.

And many more successes besides, all reflecting the deep transformation we have driven together. 

We therefore enter 2026 with renewed collective momentum, strong foundations and a clear conviction: the next three years will be those of acceleration. It is now up to us to make the most of them.

4. Next League: a collective project

This changing context prompted the launch of the Next League project, originally conceived for our sales teams. In 2026, however, our ambition goes much further: to make Next League a genuine collective movement, where every function (Sales, CSM/AM, Care, T ech, Product, Marketing, HR, Finance, Strategy and Ops) raises its level of excellence and operational maturity. 

The objective is clear: to improve how the entire company operates, decides, collaborates and aligns. This requires sharper focus, more disciplined prioritisation, and investing where impact is tangible, for both our teams and our customers. 

We also want a company that is far better aligned. This means co-constructing OKRs across teams, breaking down silos, increasing cross-functional synchronisation, and adopting collective ways of working that maximise efficiency and productivity for everyone. Individually, everyone will need to step up: more focus, greater impact, stronger discipline in daily routines, and smarter use of tools (especially AI) to move faster and deliver with greater precision and quality. 

Ultimately, the goal is to become a stronger, clearer and more credible company for our ecosystem: employees, candidates, investors and, of course, customers. A company that inspires trust through the clarity of its vision, the consistency of its operating and the quality of its execution.

How to leverage AI 

Since the arrival of ChatGPT in 2022, artificial intelligence has been profoundly reshaping our market. This is a strategic topic for Partoo, and one on which we have already shared our first thoughts through a dedicated memo. 

This 2026 memo gives us the opportunity to go one step further and present new perspectives on the role AI will play in our growth. In practical terms, artificial intelligence represents three major opportunities for Partoo for the years ahead: 

• Significant gains in internal efficiency, driven by the evolution of our ways of working, processes and tools. 
• Greater product value in a fast-changing ecosystem, supported by appropriate sales and marketing messaging, and deeper expertise. 
• A shift in our product value proposition around data, to better serve and enhance the customer experience. 

1. AI as an internal accelerator 

As early as 2023, we took AI head-on, launching a series of structural initiatives to promote its adoption across Partoo: the designation of AI champions, the organisation of reflection workshops, the testing of internal GPT s, and the implementation of a dedicated governance framework.

In 2026, our ambition is to take this one step further and make Partoo an organisation that fully harnesses the potential of AI across all its internal operations. This will of course involve using dedicated tools such as Modjo, Lemlist or Intercom, but above all, it requires a shared mindset:

• constant curiosity about new use cases,
• regular sharing of best practices, 
• and the natural integration of AI into everyday work. 

It is under these conditions that Partoo will continue to gain in efficiency, capacity for innovation and impact.

2. AI is transforming the value of our products

Beyond efficiency gains, AI is also strengthening our customers’ interest in our solutions – a unique opportunity that we must fully seize.

As the web is reshaped by AI, Partoo is now positioned at the core of local visibility for store networks on generative AI search engines such as Gemini or ChatGPT. In practical terms:

• Presence Management ensures the accuracy and consistency of local data across the platforms used by AI models (local GEO).
• Store Locator is increasingly becoming a reference source for tools such as ChatGPT or Perplexity, driving exponential demand for this product among our customers.
• Online reviews, perceived as “unbiased” sources, directly influence how AI models view brands and are becoming a strategic concern for executive committees.

This transformation is reshaping our ecosystem at a deep level, and our sales, marketing and product messaging must evolve with it. By cultivating our expertise and curiosity, we will be able to guide our customers through this change and deliver exceptional value in the age of artificial intelligence. 

3. Partoo data at the heart of our AI strategy

A few months ago, we published the article “Opportunities and challenges AI brings to Partoo” . One key takeaway stood out: as AI becomes more pervasive, companies will more than ever need interfaces capable of structuring, orchestrating and analysing data, as these are the layers that turn AI into tangible value. 

With this in mind, we have decided to evolve our product positioning and roadmap, with a clear ambition: to establish Partoo as the first Local CX Platform (previously known as the “Local Collaboration Platform”). In other words, a platform designed to align headquarters, regional teams and points of sale around a shared data foundation, in order to improve both online visibility and the overall quality of the customer experience across every local touchpoint.

Over the next three years, every innovation we deliver must fit within this framework, based on two clear principles: 

• Serving one of our two core objectives: local visibility and customer relationships.
• Adopting an AI-first approach: AI is not an “add-on” , but a structuring element of our value proposition. 

In practical terms, we view AI as a powerful opportunity to help our customers: 

• Manage consumer interactions more effectively, regardless of the channel (reviews, messaging, forms, tickets, calls, social networks, etc.). 
• Better analyse these interactions to drive useful and measurable actions: understanding customer sentiment in real time, identifying recurring pain points, prioritising actions, tracking execution, and ensuring a more consistent experience from one point of sale to another. 

The goal is not to stack AI features, but to design the system that makes them truly useful. We will build a platform that helps our customers turn local data into decisions, and then into concrete actions (both in-store and online) with a lasting impact on the customer experience.

Our north star: becoming the number one Local CX Platform 

1. The three pillars of our positioning 

Since 2018, Partoo’s positioning has been shaped around three key pillars. More than seven years later, they continue to be as relevant as ever.

1. Trusted partner 

By positioning ourselves as a trusted partner rather than a simple technology provider, we have focused on customer support (CSM & Care), advisory services, expertise and customer satisfaction – with a customer NPS of 50, well above that of our market. 

2. Local expert 

By rolling out Partoo directly to frontline teams, we have developed a deep understanding of local challenges, a simple and intuitive platform, a widely adopted mobile application, and support tailored to operational needs. 

3. All-in-one 

By integrating a comprehensive set of solutions, we offer our users a true one-stop shop that helps them standardise tools, simplify everyday operations for teams, increase usage and reduce costs. 

By adopting a different approach and maintaining a clear vision, we have been able to create a lasting competitive advantage. This unique positioning, built around platform simplicity and ease of use, is now extremely difficult to replicate.

2. A mobile-first and AI-first approach 

For the past twenty years, CX SaaS products have relied primarily on statistics, charts, and manual categorisation. Semantic analysis platforms required extensive configurations, complex business rules and a high level of user expertise. 

Yet the transition from an analytics-first to an AI-first approach demands a complete product redesign. Endless configuration needs to be replaced by AI-driven automatic clustering; charts and statistics must increasingly give way to conversational and agentic interfaces.

While much of the industry is still struggling with mobile-first, the move towards AI-first will be even harder, as it requires breaking away from a product vision rooted in two decades of legacy systems.

These profound transformations are paving the way for a new generation of players – strong enough to invest heavily in AI, yet agile enough to reinvent their foundations. Since 2022, Partoo has chosen to invest proactively in artificial intelligence, not only through new product development, but also by training teams, building internal expertise, and reorienting our vision and strategy around this new paradigm.

We have never believed in simply “riding the AI-first wave” . AI is not a goal in itself, but a powerful lever to rethink an entire market. T oday, we are confident that the mobile-first and AI-first approach we have built at Partoo allows us to profoundly reshape our industry with a genuinely innovative perspective. 

3. Partoo: a Local CX Platform 

This is an issue we identified as early as Partoo’s beginnings. While the internet has radically reshaped omnichannel purchasing journeys, retail networks still struggle to deliver a strong local customer experience (LCX). To meet this challenge, they seek a solution for frontline teams that is both powerful, simple and comprehensive, enabling true omnichannel customer experience management. 

Yet to date, local teams are forced to juggle a multitude of disconnected tools on a daily basis (VoC, social media, messaging and review management), which are often too complex and underused. 

Partoo is the first platform designed to change this.

Our ambition is to build the world’s first Local CX Platform that enables retail networks to collaborate effectively at every level – from headquarters to frontline teams – and to give every team the tools they need to deliver outstanding local marketing and customer experiences. 

Today, the CX market is structured around products: one tool for Voice of the Customer, another for social media, another for messaging, another for local presence… Brands are forced to piece together a complex and fragmented technology stack, often designed to serve organisations as diverse as Carrefour, Spotify or Coca-Cola. 

However, this logic works poorly for physical retail networks. 

Stores, branches, dealerships or restaurants do not operate in functional silos; they exist within a constant stream of local interactions, Google Maps reviews, questions on WhatsApp, comments on Facebook, etc. All part of one and the same local customer experience. 

In other words, retail networks do not need five specialised software tools. They need a unified CX platform, designed for their operational reality. That’s exactly what we aim to deliver.

What we must deliver in 2026: three growth priorities

In 2026, our ambition is clear: to strengthen our leadership in Europe while accelerating our international growth. To achieve this and respond to our customers’ needs, three strategic priorities will guide our efforts in the months ahead: 

• Moving upmarket, to work with ever more strategic customers. 
• Reinforcing cross-sell, by expanding our product offering and innovation roadmap for our existing customers. 
• Accelerating our international growth, by strengthening our key positions and opening up new markets. 

1. Moving upmarket across our three segments 

Across our three market segments, we have already embarked on an upmarket strategy that now needs to be scaled: 

For Key Accounts, which already represent 40% of our revenue, we want to accelerate. This will require a more structured commercial approach, dedicated Care and CS support, a product offering better suited to large organisations, and premium marketing focused on strategic accounts (targeted events, high-level expert content, etc.). 

In the Mid-Market, the historical core of our business, we have a unique opportunity to fully roll out our all-in-one approach by leveraging a very large installed base, with a clear objective for 2026: significantly increasing ARR per customer by cross-selling our additional products. 

As for SME, our priority is to focus on Local Networks, continue the transformation already underway and maximise NRR. Our ability to successfully complete this transition will be critical to scaling the organisation over the long term. 

Overall, accelerating our upmarket strategy will enable us to drive stronger growth, improve profitability, retention and firmly establish Partoo as the market leader across all customer segments.

2. Reinforcing cross-sell 

For more than ten years, our strongest asset has been our impressive ability to win new customers and enter new markets. 

This strategy has allowed us to build an exceptional, diverse and international customer portfolio. Y et today, our average basket remains very low compared with these companies’ marketing budgets. And this is exactly where our biggest growth opportunity lies for the years ahead. 

Our ambition is clear: make add-on product sales a major driver of growth! 

Achieving this ambition depends on a fundamental prerequisite: customer satisfaction and trust in our ability to support them across more products. 

It is here essential to highlight the tremendous work carried out by the CSM teams over recent months: better support, improved renewal rate, and a strong increase in expertise. The recent improvement in renewal rates forecasts for Q4 2025 and Q1 2025 clearly shows that the excellence of our work and our collective engagement are the foundation of the trust our customers place in us. 

Looking ahead to 2026, our objective is to improve our renewal rate, driven by more strategic customer support, deeper expertise, stronger local deployment and our ability to bring customers on board with a long-term vision. 

To succeed, we will also need to strengthen collaboration between sales and CSM teams. CSMs are now responsible for customer success (including satisfaction, value creation and usage), as well as renewals, while sales teams will have an even greater responsibility to define, in close partnership with CSMs, Expansion Plans across their entire account portfolios. Sales teams will then be responsible for driving the execution of these plans.

Accelerating our cross-sell strategy also requires us to offer additional products that are fully aligned with our customers’ current needs. This is a good moment to focus on three major offerings that could generate substantial additional sales in 2026.

a) Store Locator

AI-driven changes to the web are once again placing the Store Locator at the heart of our customers’ concerns. As the web becomes increasingly conversational, websites are turning into sources that feed AI agents such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or Mistral. T oday, Store Locators already represent more than 64% of the information sources leveraged by AI for local searches (source: Partoo/Meteoria analyses). For our customers, this creates a double challenge: 

• Structuring and optimising their Store Locator so that it is readable, understandable and fully usable by AI models. 
• Enriching store pages with more local content: reviews, news, services, photos, attributes, etc. 

b) Our Reputation offering 

Since 2018, we have continuously invested in strengthening our reputation management solutions, addressing a market that is far larger than Presence Management. At a time when online reviews influence how AI agents such as Gemini or ChatGPT “think” about brands, our customers are becoming fully aware of the importance of actively managing their digital reputation. 

Our approach is structured around two major pillars: 

A differentiated and enhanced Review Management offering: we have evolved our product by integrating a powerful analytics module, starting with AI-powered automatic review tagging and semantic analysis (RM+), and soon extending to comparative analysis of competitors’ reviews (Competitive Intelligence). 

The launch of a comprehensive “Voice of the Customer” solution: we are now integrating a Feedback Management product directly within the Partoo platform. By 2026, this solution will be enriched with many interesting features.

Through these two initiatives, Partoo is asserting a distinctive approach in a market with immense potential. Our local vision, simple and intuitive interface, and all-in-one platform are powerful differentiators that will enable us to accelerate growth, gain market share and generate significant additional revenue. 

c) Our Messages offering

Our Messages product fully aligns with our long-term vision: centralising all local customer interactions within a single platform. With the rise of agentic commerce, where online purchases are increasingly initiated or influenced by AI agents, conversational commerce is once again becoming a top priority for our customers. While the market is still in its early stages, our lead on this strategic topic is a true differentiator and positions Partoo at the forefront of innovation. 

In addition, we view customer messages as a complementary source of insights alongside public reviews and satisfaction surveys. 

By collecting and centralising all these interactions, we will ultimately be able to provide our customers with a deeper, more actionable understanding of the experience they deliver. In 2026, our priorities are clear: 

• Expanding supported messaging channels, particularly through the live chat.
• Enabling customers to extract more value from messages by automatically enriching customer data and identifying key issues within conversations.

3. Accelerating international growth

In 2026, we intend to step up our international expansion around two clear ambitions: 

• (1) Consolidating our positions in our historical markets (Southern Europe, Latin America – with particular focus on Mexico – and the Middle East). 
• (2) Becoming the European leader, which will require a stronger footprint in Northern and Eastern Europe. 

(1) Our first priority is to restore strong commercial momentum in countries where we are already leaders and where we are confident in the market potential, so that they can fully act as growth engines in the years to come. Achieving this will require: 

(2) Furthermore, if we want to be perceived as the reference player in Europe and to secure a lasting position for international framework agreements, we need to expand into strategic markets in Eastern and Northern Europe. 

We expect our market in Europe to consolidate at an accelerated pace over the coming years. In a more competitive landscape, only international players will be ableto succeed. Our ability to scale internationally will therefore be decisive for our long-term success. From 2026 onwards, over 60% of our ARR growth will come from international markets, underlining the strategic importance of this direction. 

* * * * * * 

With several hundred million points of sale worldwide, and only 300,000 currently equipped with Partoo – representing only 0.1% – we are still at the very beginning of the journey. 

There is still everything to build, and 2026 will mark a year of acceleration !