Unit4, the Dutch enterprise software company owned by private equity firm TA Associates, said on October 6, 2026 that it is acquiring Napta, a Paris startup that helps consulting, audit, IT and engineering firms decide which employees to put on which projects. Terms were not disclosed.
Napta will keep its brand and its management team. Co-founder and chief executive Arnaud Caldichoury will continue to run the company, and his co-founders are staying on. Napta will also keep supporting customers that use other vendors' ERP or professional services automation software, rather than becoming a Unit4-only product.
Investment bank Clipperton advised Napta's shareholders on the sale.
What Napta built
Napta sells software for resource management and what it calls skills intelligence. Firms use it to map their employees' skills, plan capacity, staff projects and use AI-based matching to find the right people for an assignment more quickly. It also helps managers track project costs and margins.
The company started out as PickYourSkills and changed its name to Napta in 2022. Journal du Net reported that it was founded in 2018. At the time of its 2022 fundraise it had more than 100 clients in 20 countries, including industrial groups such as EDF, Engie and Schneider Electric as well as consulting firms. Constellation Research reported that Napta has more than 100 customers, many of whom already use Unit4. French deal publication CFNEWS put its revenue at €5.4 million (about $6.3 million).
The startup had already been widening its reach before the sale. In 2022 it said its revenue had grown two and a half times between 2020 and 2021 and that about 30% of its clients came from outside consulting. CFNEWS also reported that Napta made a build-up acquisition of a Dutch company on October 1, 2026, days before the Unit4 announcement.
“We have ambitious goals to grow Unit4, and the professional services industry is the largest and fastest growing market among our key verticals.”
Why Unit4 is buying
Unit4 sells ERP, financial planning and human capital management software to mid-sized organisations and focuses on four sectors: professional and business services, the public sector, non-profits and education. Chief executive Simon Paris said professional services is the largest and fastest-growing of those markets, and the company has set a goal of doubling in size by 2030.
Unit4 plans to connect Napta's data on skills and staff capacity with its own project, financial and people data, so that customers can see who is available, what they can do and what a project will earn in one place. Constellation Research noted that Napta fills a gap alongside Unit4's ERP, finance and HR applications while Unit4 moves its customer base to the cloud.
For Napta, Caldichoury said the deal will help it speed up product development and expand internationally, and the companies said the goal is to make Napta a leading European player in resource management.
The founders and the funding
Caldichoury leads Napta as co-founder and CEO. The company raised a €1 million round in 2019 with Kerala Ventures, then in March 2022 announced €8 million (about $8.8 million at the time), made up of €5 million in equity and €3 million in debt. MAIF Avenir and Kerala Ventures took part in the equity portion. The 2022 money was meant to fund research and development and double the team to more than 70 people by the end of that year.
Unit4 itself changed hands in 2021, when TA Associates, alongside Partners Group, bought it from Advent International in a deal valued at more than $2 billion.
A crowded staffing software market
Napta competes with a range of resource planning tools. German trade publication ChannelPartner listed Dayshape and Kantata among those aimed at large consulting and audit firms, Float and Scoro for mid-sized agencies and IT services firms, Resource Guru for lighter planning, and broader professional services automation suites such as Certinia, Deltek, Wrike and Rocketlane.
By keeping Napta open to other ERP systems, Unit4 can keep selling it to firms that are not Unit4 customers while offering a tighter integration to those that are.
