Scaling smart: how Kolsquare became Europe's influencer powerhouse | Quentin Bordage | the blueprint S2E1

Hosted by Michelle Grieve, Senior Integration Manager at team.blue. Want to hear the full story? Watch the episode on YouTube or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Quentin Bordage is the founder and CEO of Kolsquare, Europe's leading influencer marketing platform. In 2024, he made a decision many founders wrestle with: joining forces with a major investor, in this case team.blue. Eighteen months on, Michelle Grieve sat down with Quentin to find out what it's really like to scale a business from the inside. 

Michelle: For anyone new to influencer marketing, could you tell us what Kolsquare does? 

Quentin: Influencer marketing is about using the power of new media. Influencers are people who have built large audiences on social media, and brands leverage that reach to attract new customers and grow awareness. It's a $3 billion industry, growing at 25% CAGR over the last five years. 

Kolsquare is a platform for brands and agencies that want to tap into this power. Think of it as a search engine covering all influencers with more than 5,000 followers. You can enter keywords, add filters about the audience, and find the right influencers for your needs. Once you've found who you want to work with, the platform works a bit like a CRM: you can contact influencers, manage the relationship, and once you launch a campaign you can monitor performance through things like promo codes. Today, we have a little more than 2,000 clients all over Europe. 

Michelle: How did you go from strategy consulting to building Kolsquare? 

Quentin: I always had the idea of creating a business on the internet. I created my first company collecting data about celebrities online to match them with brands for endorsement campaigns and events. At the time, celebrities were the first influencers. They were the first to have large audiences on Facebook, on X, and with the early wave of YouTubers. Then we saw the rise of a new kind of celebrity: people who had no real-world fame at all. So, I decided to adapt our product to influencers, with a much more automated and scalable approach. 

Michelle: When Kolsquare joined team.blue in October 2024, you were already profitable and serving clients like Coca-Cola and Netflix. What was the reality behind that? 

Quentin: We were in the scale-up phase. We had a very good product and very good client feedback, but lots of challenges around innovation: how to scale the product and innovation team, how to insert more AI, how to automate more. We were also starting to scale internationally, and to go further we needed more experience and more financial means. It's a very competitive, fragmented market, with a lot of local players in Europe where you have to adapt your value proposition and produce content in local languages. That's why we decided to join team.blue: to help us move to the next step. 

Michelle: You've since made three acquisitions. How has team.blue enabled that pace? 

Quentin: I really think it wouldn't have been possible without team.blue. When we joined, we were around 35 people. Today we're 140, which is a huge step. M&A is very people-intensive and very specific, and we didn't have that experience. team.blue supported us every step of the way. And now we're building our own integration engine internally, using everything we've learned from those first deals. 

Michelle: Many founders worry that joining a group like team.blue means losing autonomy. Was that a concern for you? 

Quentin: I had doubts beforehand. It was a big decision, so we did our own due diligence on team.blue and interviewed other entrepreneurs who had already made the move. What reassured us was how much autonomy they'd kept. For me personally, not that much changed beyond more discussions with the investor and shareholder. For the team, nothing changed at all: same day-to-day, same decision-making processes. What team.blue announced at the start was exactly what we experienced. There were no surprises. 

Michelle: What value have you found in being part of the team.blue founder community? 

Quentin: When you're an entrepreneur, most of the time you're alone with your problems, and sometimes alone with your successes too. At team.blue, we meet physically for seminars where we discuss almost everything: challenges, AI, HR. And we're connected online on Slack, where we chat every day, share good suppliers, and exchange feedback. You can learn from others, avoid certain mistakes, and it really helps you accelerate. 

Michelle: Where has team.blue helped Kolsquare most? 

Quentin: In two main areas. First, professionalising and scaling our processes and operations. On security, for example, even if you invest a lot when you're small, you don't have all the experience or the tools. team.blue brings that. Second, growth, and especially external growth through M&A, where team.blue has brought us a huge amount. 

Michelle: What advice would you give to other founders considering a similar move? 

Quentin: I would have found people to surround me and help me much earlier. I tried to do a lot of things on my own, thinking I'd do them better that way. But now that I have an amazing team with real talent, and the right partner in team.blue, it's genuinely something different. Finding the right people and finding the right partners is key to success. 

Michelle: Finally, where do you hope to see Kolsquare in five years? 

Quentin: The goal is to reach €100 million ARR, to become a unicorn, and to operate across all major geographies. We're also building a new product called Kreators, an app for content creators who want to professionalise sharing stats with brands, automating processes, benchmarking themselves. We think it's going to be very big. 

We're also a B Corp, and we donate 1% of our annual revenues to NGOs fighting the negative effects of social media. We've recently created a foundation called 1% for Social Dilemma, with the goal of convincing other entrepreneurs to do the same. The more we grow, the more we can donate. As an entrepreneur, you can have a real impact, and we don't want to brush the dark sides of social media under the carpet. 

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