Hirsch Group formerly Vitaprotech

Here is the setup. Protecting a sensitive site - a data center, a government building, a piece of critical infrastructure - is not one problem. It is ten problems: perimeter detection, access control, video surveillance, intercom, credentialing, alarm management, and the software that is supposed to make all of it talk to each other. Historically you bought each piece from a different specialist, wired them together, and prayed. The result was ten dashboards and one very tired security operator at 3am trying to figure out whether the fence alarm was an intruder or a fox.

Vitaprotech's answer to this was not to invent a better sensor. It was to buy the specialists and glue them into a platform. Founded as a French security group in 2012, it grew mostly by acquisition - perimeter-intrusion pioneer Sorhea (making detection systems since 1987), access-control firm TIL Technologies, the video-analytics maker Foxstream, UK detection specialist Harper Chalice, the access manufacturer TDSi, and roughly a dozen others. The logic is the boring, durable logic of roll-ups everywhere: if the customer wants one throat to choke, become the throat.

That is a fine business. It is not, on its own, a headline. The headline arrived in 2024, when Vitaprotech spent about $145 million to buy the security business of Identiv, an American company, and got with it something more valuable than the hardware - a brand called Hirsch that U.S. federal agencies had trusted for decades. Names like Velocity and ScramblePad came along too.

And then Vitaprotech did the thing that makes this worth writing about. It did not slap its own logo on the acquisition. It did the reverse. In 2026, the entire group - French parent, Lyon headquarters, fourteen companies and all - renamed itself Hirsch. The buyer took the name of the thing it bought.

You can read that as ego, but it is closer to arithmetic. In the market Hirsch sells into, a brand is not decoration - it is a compliance moat and a trust signal. A name that federal buyers already know is worth more than the acquirer's own name, which they don't. Keeping "Hirsch" was cheaper than earning that trust from scratch, and considerably faster. The whole $145M made more sense the moment the wordmark survived it.

The combined company now runs at roughly $185 million in revenue with more than 700 employees, over a hundred of them software engineers. Its cloud software carries FedRAMP Marketplace authorization; its access-control readers are certified FICAM-compliant. Translated out of acronym: it has passed the specific, expensive gates that let you sell security to the U.S. government, which is a business most competitors cannot simply decide to enter.

Two men sit at the top. Eric Thord, who has led the group since 2012, is the builder - the one who ran the roll-up. Steven Humphreys, who ran Identiv for nearly a decade, is now Deputy CEO; he is the one who sold his company into this and stayed in the room, which is either a graceful exit or no exit at all, depending on how you feel about second acts. His thesis is tidy: the interesting frontier in security is the seam between physical and digital identity - the badge and the login, the door and the credential - and whoever owns that seam owns something durable.

Under it all is private equity doing what private equity does. Eurazeo took a majority stake in 2018 and, by its own account, roughly tripled the business before selling to Apax Partners in 2023 at a healthy multiple. The Identiv deal followed under Apax's ownership. If you want to understand how European industrial software actually scales - patiently, through acquisition, under successive PE owners - Vitaprotech's cap table is a cleaner case study than most Silicon Valley narratives.