De Groot Family Office

The De Groot Family Office (‘DGFO’) was founded by drs. J.A.G. (Han) de Groot. Han started DGFO after the sale of its globally operating marketing technology company MetrixLab (and US based MarketTools) to private equity firm Bain Capital. Sponsored by Bain Capital, De Groot merged MetrixLab and MarketTools with Japan based Macromill, and became its Global CEO (until Nov 2015) and Board Director (until Nov 2016).

The merger created a leading marketing technology company with more than 1700 employees and 34 offices worldwide. The company went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in march 2017. De Groot continued as shareholder until early 2018.

De Groot founded MetrixLab in 1999 on a mission to prove that market research could be conducted better, faster and cheaper over the internet. He expanded MetrixLab from the Netherlands into the UK, Germany, France, Spain, North and South America, Singapore and China.

To accelerate MetrixLab’s growth De Groot executed six acquisitions: Quickwise (UK, 2006); 2C Communication (NL, 2007); CRM Metrix (France, 2011); MarketTools (USA, 2012); PrecisionSample (USA, 2013), and Oxyme (NL, 2014).

The largest and most transformative transaction was the acquisition in 2012 of San Francisco headquartered online survey pioneer MarketTools from US private equity firm TPG Growth. De Groot became its CEO and relocated to the US to manage the company and oversee its integration with MetrixLab.

Late 2014, sponsored by US private equity firm Bain Capital, he merged MetrixLab|MarketTools with Japan based Macromill and became its Global CEO.

The merger created a leading online marketing technology company with more than EUR 200 million in sales, 1700 employees and 34 offices worldwide. The company had become one of the largest providers of online survey research in the world.