Luciano Cunha, CEO of Staedean, shares how two decades of vertical depth in the Microsoft Dynamics ecosystem became a competitive moat and why agentic ERP is an opportunity, not a threat, for industry-specific software builders.
.jpg)
In this new episode of our Insights from Tech Leaders series, Julia Reulet, Managing Director at Dedale Intelligence, sits down with Luciano Cunha, CEO of Staedean, to explore how one of the most distinctive vertical software companies in the Microsoft Dynamics ecosystem has reinvented itself over two decades and why deep industry specificity is now its greatest competitive moat.
Staedean, formerly known as to/Increase, has grown from a 50-person company in Veenendaal to a 200+ person global software group serving 2,000+ customers across 45 countries, with headquarters in Amsterdam. After a PE-backed sale to Rivean Capital in 2021 and a full rebrand in July 2024, Luciano reflects on what it takes to build a durable vertical software business inside a hyperscaler ecosystem, and what comes next as AI reshapes the ERP landscape.
🎥 Watch the full interview
🎧 Listen to the podcast
Asked to describe Staedean's journey in three words, Luciano does not hesitate: reinvention, resilience, and people. The three are not incidental. They describe a business that has remade itself multiple times, from a small Dutch ISV serving the local Dynamics ecosystem to a global vertical software group, while holding together an organisation across geographies, ownership changes, and a complete rebrand.
The reinvention started early. Staedean was founded as to/Increase in 2000 at the peak of the dot-com bubble, originally building horizontal tools on top of Microsoft Dynamics. Over time, the team made a deliberate bet on going deep rather than broad, narrowing the focus to manufacturing, life sciences, and rental, and building proprietary vertical functionality that Microsoft itself would not build.
"We made a conscious decision to go vertical. That was the reinvention. And it was not obvious at the time."
Resilience came from navigating what Luciano describes as the inherent difficulty of building in the Microsoft ecosystem: staying relevant as the platform evolves, maintaining customer trust across major version transitions, and competing with a vendor that is simultaneously your most important partner and your most proximate competitive threat.
The rename from to/Increase to Staedean in July 2024 was not cosmetic. Luciano is direct about what it was intended to communicate. The old name was well known within the Dynamics partner ecosystem but carried no meaning outside of it. For a company now operating across 45 countries and serving customers in sectors far removed from Dynamics enthusiasts, the name was a constraint.
The new name, Staedean, derived from the Old English word for "place", was chosen to reflect the company's geographic breadth while staying grounded in its European roots. More than the name, the rebrand coincided with a deliberate repositioning: Staedean was not just a Microsoft partner, it was an industry software company that happened to be built on Microsoft.
"The name to/Increase was known in the Dynamics world. But it told you nothing about what we do for manufacturers or life sciences companies. Staedean is the foundation we build on."
In 2021, Luciano led the sale of the company to Rivean Capital, a European mid-market private equity firm. The decision to sell and the decision to stay are both worth examining.
On the sale, Luciano's view is disarmingly pragmatic: a sellable business is simply a good business. The attributes that made to/Increase attractive to a PE buyer, recurring revenue, low churn, a defensible niche, a scalable model, are the same attributes that make a software company durable over time. He did not build the company to sell it. He built it well, and the sale followed.
On staying, Luciano is equally clear. PE ownership is not an exit for a founder-CEO who still has conviction about where the business should go. The partnership with Rivean Capital was structured with that conviction in mind: Luciano leads the business, and the institutional backing accelerates the things that were previously constrained by capital, international expansion, M&A, talent acquisition.
"A sellable business is just a good business. Build for the long run, and the sale takes care of itself."
The AI question in vertical ERP is not abstract. It has a concrete answer, and Luciano gives it directly: AI is a significant threat for generic ISVs building screens and forms on top of Dynamics, and a meaningful opportunity for vertical players with deep domain knowledge.
The logic is straightforward. What AI can replicate quickly is generic functionality, the configuration work, the standard modules, the undifferentiated features that any developer with a capable model and six months of runway could build. What AI cannot replicate quickly is 20 years of accumulated knowledge about how a specific type of manufacturer runs its operations, what edge cases arise in rental fleet management, or how a life sciences company handles serialisation compliance across 15 jurisdictions.
That knowledge lives in Staedean's product, in its implementation methodology, and in the heads of its people. It is not in any training dataset.
"Generic ISVs should be worried. Vertical players with real domain depth have an advantage they did not have before AI. The gap between knowing the domain and not knowing it just got wider."
For all the enthusiasm around AI in manufacturing and industrial software, Luciano identifies a structural problem that most vendors are underplaying: the data is not ready.
Most manufacturers have spent years building ERP systems that were not designed with AI consumption in mind. Data is siloed across modules, inconsistently structured, and in many cases simply incomplete. The assumption that a cloud migration solves this is wrong. Cleaning data once, at the point of migration, is not the same as having a data architecture built for continuous machine learning.
The implication for Staedean, and for any vertical software vendor with serious ambitions around AI, is that the product roadmap has to include a data readiness layer. Not just the AI features, but the infrastructure that makes those features meaningful.
"You can build the most sophisticated AI model in the world and it will not matter if the underlying data is a mess. Most of our customers have a data maturity journey ahead of them before AI delivers what they expect."
Staedean's decision to build entirely within the Microsoft ecosystem, across Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Azure, and more recently Fabric, is a strategic choice Luciano defends on three grounds: reach, lower cost of innovation, and the trust that comes with being a certified Microsoft partner.
Reach is the most obvious: building on Dynamics gives Staedean access to Microsoft's global customer base and partner network without having to build and maintain its own distribution infrastructure. Lower investment means that every time Microsoft adds a capability to Azure or Fabric, Staedean can leverage it without rebuilding from scratch. Trust is more subtle but equally important: in highly regulated industries like life sciences, being a Microsoft-certified solution carries weight with procurement teams that an independent vendor would have to earn separately.
The risk, and Luciano does not avoid it, is platform dependency. When Microsoft decides to build a capability that Staedean currently owns, the pressure is real. His response is consistent with the broader argument: go deep enough in the verticals that Microsoft will not follow, because the return on investment for a hyperscaler in a niche industry is simply not there.
On the near-term horizon, the development Luciano watches most closely is agentic ERP, the use of AI agents to automate the implementation and configuration process. The current state of a Dynamics go-live involves an enormous amount of structured configuration work: selecting options, setting parameters, validating outputs across hundreds of interdependent modules. It is time-consuming, error-prone, and largely undifferentiated.
Microsoft is already working on compressing this with Project MIA. Staedean is developing its own capabilities in the same direction. The vision is an implementation process that takes weeks rather than months, with agents handling the configuration layer and human consultants focusing on the decisions that actually require business judgment.
For the consulting ecosystem that depends on implementation revenue, this is a disruption worth taking seriously. Luciano's read is measured but honest: the headcount required for a standard Dynamics implementation will shrink. The value consultants provide will shift upward, toward business transformation rather than technical configuration. Whether the ecosystem adapts fast enough is an open question.
"Project MIA is already doing a lot of that. The implementation of tomorrow will look nothing like the implementation of today. And that is a good thing for customers."
Asked what keeps him up at night, Luciano gives an answer that cuts across the strategy discussion: talent. Not the supply of talent in the abstract, but the specific challenge of finding people who are comfortable with change, humble enough to learn continuously, and driven enough to build something that outlasts them.
As Staedean has grown from a single-office Dutch company to a distributed global organisation, the cultural challenge has scaled with it. The practices that held the team together at 50 people do not automatically transfer to 200. The leaders who thrived in a scrappy, founder-led environment are not always the leaders who can manage a function across four time zones. Navigating that transition without losing the qualities that made the company good in the first place is, in Luciano's view, the hardest problem in scaling a software business.
Looking ahead, Luciano's ambition is not framed in revenue targets or market share. He uses a phrase that recurs across the conversation: "grown to adulthood." An organisation that is responsible, sustainable, and built to outlast any single investor cycle. One that has earned the right to operate in the verticals it serves, not just because it has the best product, but because it has the deepest relationships and the strongest track record.
Within that, the M&A agenda is active. Rivean's backing gives Staedean the capital to consolidate adjacent vertical ISVs within the Dynamics ecosystem, and Luciano is explicit that inorganic growth is part of the plan. The filter is consistent with everything else in the conversation: depth over breadth, verticals where domain knowledge matters, and businesses that have already done the hard work of building trust with their customers.
This interview is part of our Insights from Tech Leaders series, where Dedale Intelligence sits down with senior executives and investors across the global technology landscape to explore the trends shaping software markets.
About Staedean
Staedean is a global vertical software company built on the Microsoft Dynamics ecosystem, delivering industry-specific solutions for manufacturers, life sciences companies, and rental organizations. With 200+ employees, 2,000+ customers across 45 countries, and headquarters in Amsterdam, Staedean combines deep domain expertise with the full power of the Microsoft platform. PE-backed by Rivean Capital since 2021. For more information, visit: www.staedean.com
Get started
Dedale is growing fast and we are continuously looking to widen our reach in the ecosystem. Let's connect!
Members
Join our Community of Industry Veterans that we collaborate with to conduct deep research
Join the community
Investors, Corporates, and M&A Advisors
Learn more about how collaborating with Dedale Intelligence could enhance your intelligence generation efforts
Request an introduction
Talents
We are looking for smart, hungry, humble individuals to join our fast growing team worldwide!
Join the team
.jpg)
.jpg)