Leonardo Gonzalez wants to work alongside founders and families, focusing on smooth handovers, operational continuity, and the long-term stewardship of a Spanish SME. He has launched Baetica Capital, paying tribute to the Roman province of Hispania Baetica, one of the most prosperous regions of the ancient world, spanning what is now Andalusia. The name reflects his belief that great businesses, like great civilizations, are built on strong foundations and long-term thinking. He fundraised in a dozen weeks and was nearly twice oversubscribed. His journey as a searcher is supported by JB46, Alza Capital, Evolutiq, Pina Capital, Lineage Partners, Beka Finance, Celium Capital, Cabiesa, Asta Capital, 9T Capital, and Mazal Capital.

Leo brings more than 15 years of experience across investment and business management. Over the course of his career, he has acquired more than 30 companies and led one of the largest hospital networks in its sector, comprising 100 centres and 3,000 employees. His experience as both an investor and an operator has shaped his approach to entrepreneurship and succession, with a particular focus on understanding the challenges of building a business and preserving what works when leadership changes hands. Leo studied at the University of Oxford and is a CFA Charterholder. His previous roles include Director and Senior Vice President in Private Equity at Patria Investimentos, CFO of Opty, Board Member of Smart Fit, and Analyst at Credit Suisse.

Leo focuses on acquiring one established mid-sized business in Spain, with a sector-agnostic approach that includes services, B2B, technology, and other proven industries. He is particularly interested in businesses facing a retirement or succession situation, including family-owned companies without a next-generation successor, as well as stable businesses with clear potential for further growth. He will start his search with companies with more than €2.5M in EBITDA located in the south of Spain. Beyond financial performance, he values strong management teams, loyal customer bases, solid reputations, and defensible competitive positions, seeking companies with a strong foundation that can be preserved and further developed under new ownership.

Maxime de Juniac and Jean-Baptiste Fontes met 13 years ago, when they moved to New York to pursue their studies and became roommates in a tiny apartment between 13th Street and Avenue A. These two experienced entrepreneurs have now partnered to launch 13A Transmission, with the ambition of ensuring the continuity and development of a French SME. They are backed by investors and experts from France, Germany, the UK, Spain, Canada, the US, and Mexico, including Alza Capital Partners, Inseta Partners, Istria Capital, LeFonds Capital, Legate Partners, Lineage, Orca Equity Partners, Peter’s Troop, EPA Investissements, Caméléon Invest, Asta Capital, Guy Solomon, Quentin Brackers, Guillaume Motte, Alain Jarre, Thomas Ribéreau, Alex Hansen, Jan Fritz, David Jacq, and Quentin de Metz.

Maxime is an executive specializing in operations, technology, and the transformation of high-growth organizations. A graduate of École des Ponts and Columbia University, he began his career in strategy consulting at Boston Consulting Group, where he worked with numerous industrial and services groups on operational transformation programs and the launch of new business activities. He then held leadership positions at high-growth technology companies. At Frichti and later Gorillas, he led the development of technology products and logistics algorithms deployed at scale across Europe. More recently, as COO at Swan, he structured and scaled the fintech’s operations. Swan specializes in payments and serves French and European SMEs. He grew the Operations teams from 25 to more than 90 employees while automating numerous processes using AI and no-code tools. He also completed the training program offered by CRA.

Jean-Baptiste is an entrepreneur and operator with extensive experience in building, acquiring, and transforming technology and industrial businesses. An engineer from Arts et Métiers ParisTech and a graduate of the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering, he began his career by launching several entrepreneurial ventures. He was notably behind BYCA, a profitable, independently operated brand, and Lexilife, an innovative technology designed for people with dyslexia. For Lexilife, he raised more than €1 million and led the product through to commercialization. He subsequently gained significant experience in successful business acquisitions and turnarounds, notably growing Thomas Watt Lighting Pro and restoring growth and profitability at Impeto Medical. More recently, at Withings, he held senior roles in operations and strategic partnerships, where he led the integration of acquisitions, built and structured operational teams of more than 50 people, and developed major partnerships with leading international technology companies.

13A Transmission is looking to acquire a French company with an enterprise value of €10-40M. They primarily focus on the three sectors in which they have spent a significant part of their careers and where they believe they can have the greatest impact: Software & Technology (including connected hardware), Mobility & Logistics, and Financial Services.

For decades, one of the oldest principles in M&A has been remarkably simple: “You make your money on the buy, not on the sell.”

A recent analysis by McKinsey provides fresh evidence that this principle is becoming increasingly relevant in private equity. As market conditions have become more challenging and acquisition multiples have risen, purchase price discipline is increasingly separating the best-performing investors from the rest.

The finding is particularly relevant for entrepreneurs pursuing acquisitions of SMEs. In a competitive market, it can be tempting to stretch valuation expectations to secure a deal. But the data suggests that paying the right price at entry can have a much greater impact on returns than many buyers may expect.

When high entry multiples did not seem to matter

McKinsey compared two groups of private equity buyout fund vintages: 2010–2017 and 2018–2023. Within each period, funds were divided into quartiles according to the purchase price multiple (PPM) they paid relative to EBITDA.

During the post-financial-crisis boom between 2010 and 2017, the relationship between entry price and returns was relatively weak. Funds that bought companies at the lowest multiples generated an average 2.8x MOIC, compared with 2.7x for funds that paid the highest multiples.

In other words, buying cheaply helped, but the difference was relatively small. The explanation is straightforward. The period was characterized by cheap financing, expanding acquisition multiples and strong market tailwinds. Rising valuations could compensate, at least partially, for paying more at entry.

The environment has changed: Price discipline is becoming a competitive advantage

For the 2018–2023 vintage group, the difference became much more pronounced. Buyout funds in the lowest purchase-price quartile generated an average 3.4x MOIC, compared with 2.7x for those that paid the highest multiples. That represents a significant gap in returns. And the difference becomes even more striking when McKinsey looks at the best-performing investors within each purchase-price quartile.

Among recent vintages, the top performers that bought at the lowest multiples achieved an impressive 5.5x MOIC. Even the strongest performers among those paying the highest multiples reached only 3.6x.

The message is difficult to ignore: Operational excellence matters. Growth matters. Financing matters. But the price paid for the business matters too—and increasingly so.

The margin for error is shrinking

One reason the issue is becoming more important is that entry valuations have risen substantially. Global buyout entry multiples reached an average of 11.8x EBITDA in 2025, according to McKinsey. For transactions above $500M, the average reached 18.1x EBITDA. At those levels, there is considerably less room for mistakes.

Buyers may justify higher valuations by pointing to the quality and resilience of the businesses they are acquiring. A highly recurring revenue base, strong competitive positioning, attractive growth prospects or exceptional management can certainly justify paying a premium.

But every additional turn of EBITDA paid at entry increases the burden on the investment case. If growth disappoints, margins fail to expand, leverage cannot be maintained or the exit multiple contracts, the consequences of overpaying become much harder to absorb.

What does this mean for ETA?

Searchers typically acquire much smaller companies than traditional PE funds, and the dynamics of SME transactions are different. But the fundamental investment equation remains the same.

A searcher can create significant value through operational improvements, professionalization, organic growth, add-on acquisitions and better management. Yet value creation starts with the price paid for the initial business.

This is especially important because searchers often compete against strategic buyers, PE-backed platforms and other entrepreneurs for attractive businesses.

The temptation is therefore understandable: stretch the valuation to win the deal, assuming that future growth will make today’s price look reasonable.

But a searcher should ask a different question: What does this purchase price require me to achieve for the investment to work?

Paying 6x EBITDA instead of 5x may look like a relatively small difference. But if the company does not grow as expected, that additional turn can materially reduce the investor’s return. Conversely, acquiring a solid business at an attractive entry multiple creates an immediate margin of safety and gives the new owner more room to execute.

The importance of the “margin of safety”

For searchers, purchase price discipline does not necessarily mean always offering the lowest price. The objective is to find the right relationship between price, quality and future value creation potential.

A business with exceptional characteristics may deserve a higher multiple. The key is whether the buyer can identify the specific sources of value that justify paying that premium, and whether those assumptions are sufficiently robust.

This is where the distinction between price and value becomes critical.

A company may genuinely be worth more to a particular buyer because of synergies, operational expertise or growth opportunities. But that does not automatically mean the buyer should pay all of that future value to the seller today. The buyer needs to retain enough of the upside to compensate for the execution risk.

Don’t rely only on the exit to fix the entry

The traditional M&A saying is sometimes interpreted as meaning that a good buyer should simply acquire cheaply and sell at a higher price. The reality is more nuanced.

A successful acquisition does not necessarily require buying at a bargain price. Nor can a low entry multiple compensate for a fundamentally weak business.

But McKinsey’s data reinforces an important principle: the higher the price paid at entry, the more operational and financial performance is required to generate an attractive return.

In an environment where acquisition multiples are elevated and financing is less forgiving, the ability to create value after closing becomes even more important—but so does the ability to avoid giving away too much value before closing.

For searchers, this may be one of the most important lessons of all: The acquisition is not the moment when value creation begins. It is the moment when the consequences of the purchase price become locked in. And sometimes, the best deal is not the one you manage to close, it’s the one you manage to buy at the right price.

Read the full stufy here: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/private-capital/our-insights/private-equity-confirms-a-timeless-principle-purchase-price-matters

When two complementary profiles team up—an operator and a dealmaker—the result is often a successful and rapid fundraising. Thomas Bournac and Eddy Hami, friends for more than 10 years who have worked together over the past three years, have launched EPS Capital to acquire and operate a French SME. Within just a few weeks, they secured the support of numerous investors and ultimately chose JB46, Alza Capital, ONEtoONE Asset Management, Orca Equity Partners, Legacy Partners, Peter’s Troop, EPA Investissement, Scipio, Le Fonds Capital, Spectra Investment, Caméléon Invest, and Colca Capital to back their search.

Thomas is an experienced operating executive. After working at Amazon and FlixBus, he founded Amblea in 2018, a platform specializing in non-emergency medical transportation. He led the company through several stages of development, a strategic turnaround, an acquisition, and a return to profitability.

Eddy is an experienced finance professional with ten years of experience. After beginning his career at Goldman Sachs and then Permira, he took on the financial and strategic leadership of PropTech company Zefir before advising French SMEs, mid-sized companies, and investment funds on M&A through his own boutique.

“We want to work alongside a business owner preparing for succession. Our ambition is to preserve what makes their company strong while accelerating its development. As numerous transformations, particularly technological ones, are emerging, we believe we have a generational responsibility to help our SME ecosystem benefit from them. This is precisely the purpose of our project,” says Thomas Bournac.

“We would like to thank the investors supporting us in this project. Their trust and support are instrumental in enabling us, in our own way, to help ensure that France’s SME ecosystem remains the foundation of our economy,” adds Eddy Hami.

EPS Capital focuses on acquiring and operating French SMEs that address essential and structural needs of the economy and society, particularly in the context of growing climate challenges and geopolitical tensions. Its investment thesis is built around four key sectors: Cleaning & Environment, Energy, Healthcare, and Mobility & Transportation. The firm targets resilient businesses benefiting from long-term demographic, regulatory, environmental, and geopolitical trends, with a particular focus on companies that contribute to environmental sustainability, energy efficiency and decarbonization, healthcare delivery, and the optimization and decarbonization of passenger and freight transportation.

In October 2020, Orlan Davies and John Rochefort teamed up to launch Athenaeum Partners. After two years of searching, they acquired NetSuite’s high-tech partner AppWrap, with investors such as WSC & Company, Milk Street Ventures, and Riviera Capital, among others. Rob Cherun joined the Board of Directors.

Founded in 2015 in Silicon Valley, AppWrap is a trusted leader in NetSuite optimization, implementation, and support for high-growth, PE-backed, and software companies across the U.S. The company combines practical business knowledge with deep technical expertise, including certified NetSuite specialists, CPAs, and integration experts, to help clients maximize their investment in NetSuite and across their broader tech stack. With more than 115 managed services clients, a team of approximately 55 consultants, and a 98% customer retention rate, AppWrap delivers implementation, integrations, and ongoing ERP support as a scalable, seamless extension of its clients’ finance and operations teams.

Armanino, a top-20 accounting and consulting firm in the U.S. and a leader in AI-driven innovation, has just announced the acquisition of AppWrap. The combination expands Armanino’s award-winning NetSuite practice and strengthens its ability to serve the full office of the CFO, from initial strategy and system design through implementation, integration, ongoing optimization, and support. It also creates meaningful cross-selling opportunities across both platforms.

“We chose Armanino because of how closely our values and vision align,” said John Rochefort, Co-CEO of AppWrap. “We’ve always believed that the office of the CFO deserves more than a legacy consulting model. It deserves a technology-forward partner who can automate, optimize, and scale alongside the business. Armanino is that firm. Joining with them accelerates by years what we set out to build, and gives our clients access to the depth and resources of a national firm without losing the relationship-driven model they expect.”

M&A: Envoy Capital Advisors / Legal: Albrecht Law

Why the disposition that sustains a two-year search is the same one that can compromise the decision to buy

By Javier García Manzanedo, Founder’s Risk Due Diligence for Investors

To make it easier for you to read this article, we suggest downloading it in PDF Format.

Javier García Manzanedo is an entrepreneurship psychologist specializing in founder risk due diligence for investors. His work focuses on the human factors that financial and legal due diligence often overlook, with particular attention to founder transitions, leadership assessment, and post-acquisition integration in founder-led businesses. Drawing on evidence-based assessment and psychometrics, he helps investors make safer decisions by identifying the people risks that shape continuity, performance, and long-term value creation.

In search funds, the deal phase is the most heavily instrumented part of the cycle. Valuation methods, quality-of-earnings work, structuring, financing and legal diligence have all become more disciplined over the past decade, and the standard of analysis routinely applied to a target company today would have been unusual not long ago.

Yet all of that instrumentation serves a decision that is finally made by one person, under conditions the instruments do not measure and which have been forming for close to two years before the decision arrives.

And that matters more than it may seem.

This is the central argument: the deal phase is psychologically the most treacherous of the four, because it asks the searcher for a disposition that the search phase has spent two years selecting against. Much of what allows someone to survive a long search is precisely what makes it harder for them to stop, and when the phase is treated as a purely analytical problem, the variable most likely to distort the outcome is left outside the frame.

What the search selects for, the deal punishes

The first article in this series described the search phase as requiring adaptive persistence, frustration tolerance, emotional stability, and the capacity to sustain motivation without immediate reinforcement. That description still holds, but it says little about what those months do to the person living through them.

Month after month, a long search filters for the willingness to continue in the absence of reward. It rewards conviction, tolerance of repeated rejection, and the ability to keep believing in an outcome that no evidence yet supports, and those are not incidental traits: they are the reason the searcher is still in the market at all.

Then the deal phase arrives and asks for something close to the opposite, which is the willingness to conclude, after all of that, that the opportunity finally in hand is not good enough, and to return to a pipeline that has already exhausted them.

The disposition that carries a searcher to month twenty is not obviously the disposition that allows them to walk away in month twenty-three.

None of this is a claim about weak candidates. It is a claim about sequence, one that applies with most force to the searchers who have worked hardest, and the conflict it describes is built into the model rather than into the individual.

Commitment is not the same as conviction

The relevant evidence is old, unusually consistent, and rarely discussed in this market. Staw (1976) found that decision-makers who had personally committed resources to a course of action allocated more to it after negative feedback rather than less, and two later syntheses mapped the conditions under which this occurs: Sleesman, Conlon, McNamara and Miles (2012) meta-analysed the determinants of escalation of commitment, while Sleesman, Lennard, McNamara and Conlon (2018) extended the analysis across individual, group and organisational levels.

Several of the conditions they identify describe the search fund’s deal phase with uncomfortable precision — personal responsibility for the original decision, public commitment, sunk investment, ambiguous feedback and time pressure — and it is unusual for all five to be present at once.

Sunk cost deserves particular attention (Arkes & Blumer, 1985), because in a search the sunk investment is not primarily financial. It is time, opportunity cost, reputation inside a small and well-connected community, and something harder to name: the identity of being someone who is in the process of buying a company, an identity sustained in public for close to two years. Withdrawing from a deal forfeits the work, and for a period it also forfeits the answer to what the searcher is currently doing with their life.

Kahneman and Lovallo (1993) added a further layer, describing the tendency to evaluate a project from the inside, through its own plan and its own merits, rather than against the distribution of outcomes for comparable projects, while Malmendier and Tate (2008) found that overconfident chief executives were more likely to undertake acquisitions, particularly value-destroying ones, and that markets reacted more negatively to their announcements. Overconfidence here is not bravado but what Moore and Healy (2008) call overprecision: excessive certainty about the accuracy of one’s own estimates.

Confirmation bias (Nickerson, 1998) rarely appears in diligence as the suppression of bad news; it appears as asymmetric scrutiny, in which findings that support the thesis are accepted at face value while findings that threaten it are investigated until an explanation is found, and an explanation can almost always be found.

The cost of saying no is not in the model

Two figures make the pressure concrete: of concluded first-time search funds, 37% made no acquisition at all, and the median time from the start of the search to closing was 23 months (Kelly & Heston, 2024).

Every searcher knows a version of both numbers, and together they create a specific situation. Somewhere between month eighteen and month twenty-six, a searcher who has not yet closed becomes aware of approaching the boundary between the two outcomes, and aware that the boundary is visible to the people who funded them.

The structure of the vehicle sharpens this further, since search capital is finite, its consumption is legible to the cap table, and the investors who funded the search are in most cases the same investors who will be asked to fund the acquisition, without any guarantee that they will.

What results is an environment in which declining is expensive in ways the financial model does not price. Nothing in the deal documents captures the cost of returning to a pipeline in month twenty-four, and the searcher carries that cost alone, at the moment they are being asked to make the most consequential judgment of the cycle.

What deterioration looks like from the outside

Escalation is difficult to observe in oneself and reasonably easy to observe in someone else, provided the observer knows what to attend to, and several patterns are worth watching for.

The industry filter, customer-concentration limit or margin floor that was firm in month six becomes negotiable in month twenty, with the revision presented as refinement rather than relaxation.

Diligence findings get absorbed rather than weighed: each issue receives a reasonable explanation, and ten explained issues end up treated as ten resolved issues rather than as a signal in their own right.

Somewhere in the process the operative question shifts, without anyone announcing it, from whether this is a good business at this price to whether the searcher can make it work.

Urgency starts being attributed to the outside, in the form of a competing bidder, a seller’s deadline or a closing window, and while these are sometimes real they are also the most convenient available reason to shorten deliberation.

And the advisory circle narrows without anyone being excluded, because the searcher simply spends more time with the people who are encouraging and less with the one who keeps raising the same objection.

None of these is diagnostic on its own; what matters is the direction of travel over several weeks, and whether anyone other than the searcher is tracking it.

Structure, not willpower

The natural response is to tell searchers to be careful and investors to be sceptical, and neither works, for the same reason: a person under commitment pressure cannot reliably audit their own commitment while it is operating.

More useful is what Kahneman, Sibony and Sunstein (2021) call decision hygiene, meaning procedures that improve judgment without requiring anyone to diagnose which specific bias is at work in a given case, of which four are directly applicable to this phase.

The first is to write kill criteria before the letter of intent — not preferences, and not a long list, but a small number of conditions under which the searcher will withdraw, dated and shared with the board while the deal is still abstract enough to be considered clearly. The value of the exercise lies almost entirely in its timing.

The second is to run a premortem at the letter of intent rather than at closing (Klein, 2007), assuming the acquisition has failed badly two years from now and explaining why. Run while the decision can still change, a premortem is a diligence tool; run at closing, it is a formality.

The third is to separate sourcing from validation, so that the person who found and developed the opportunity is not the only one assessing whether it clears the bar. In small teams this is inconvenient, which is precisely why it tends to be skipped.

The fourth is to ask what evidence would change the answer and then ask whether anyone has gone looking for it, since Haran, Ritov and Mellers (2013) found that actively open-minded thinking predicted both how much information people acquired and how well calibrated their judgments were. The question is cheap; the follow-up is the part that does the work.

None of these procedures asks the searcher to be less committed. What they do is make the decision less dependent on that commitment at the moment of maximum pressure.

This phase requires a more expert psychological reading

The real question, then, is not whether the deal phase has a psychological dimension. It obviously does. The more important question is whether that dimension is being read with enough precision, and early enough to matter.

Exposure to this failure mode is not evenly distributed, which is what makes it a question for assessment rather than only for governance. Need for cognitive closure, understood as a preference for a definite answer over continued ambiguity together with discomfort at unresolved states, bears directly on a phase whose central demand is tolerating a further period without resolution, and it is a measurable construct with an established instrument and a validated short form (Webster & Kruglanski, 1994; Roets & Van Hiel, 2011). Actively open-minded thinking has been shown to predict information acquisition and calibration (Haran, Ritov, & Mellers, 2013), and overprecision in the sense described by Moore and Healy (2008) bears on how confidently a searcher treats their own estimates when those estimates are load-bearing.

None of this is exotic, and these variables can be assessed with instruments that meet ordinary standards of evidence for the intended interpretation, which is the requirement set out in the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA, & NCME, 2014) and the argument the first article in this series made about the cycle as a whole.

That does not mean a tool resolves the decision. It means a structured assessment can identify, before the pressure arrives, which searchers will need more governance in the deal phase and which conversations should happen in month twenty rather than month twenty-four. This is where an ordered methodology can make sense: an approach such as APF® may be useful not to label the searcher, but to organise hypotheses about functional fit, anticipate where judgment is most likely to come under strain, and help calibrate the structure the deal phase will require.

Conclusion

In search funds, a good acquisition does not depend only on finding a good company and negotiating a sound price. It also depends on something much less visible, which is whether the person making the decision is still able to reject it.

That capacity is neither a matter of character nor fixed. It depends on disposition, on what was written down before the pressure arrived, and on whether anyone other than the searcher is responsible for reading the evidence at the point where reading it accurately has become expensive.

Which is why this phase deserves more than confidence in the process. Diligence protects the buyer from what the company is hiding, but it does not protect the buyer from what two years of searching have done to the person reading the diligence.

References

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After more than two decades in finance and large-scale operations, Conrado Freire has decided to pursue entrepreneurship with purpose, embarking on a journey that brings together experience, values, and transformation. He has launched SOR Capital to acquire and operate an exceptional Brazilian middle-market company. He is supported by Brazilian and international partners, including Allievo Capital, Alza Capital Partners, Ibérica Investment Partners, Iniginy Capital, Cabiedes Capital, Itaca Capital Partners, Kinderhook Partners, Kviv Ventures, KYR Capital, Newton Equity Partners, Omer Ben Shach, and Osher Investimentos.

Conrado is a seasoned executive with two decades of experience across sectors such as consulting, financial markets, energy, and food retail, working in challenging environments in Brazil and other Latin American countries. He spent nearly seven years at Restaurant Brands International, where he held senior leadership positions at Burger King, most recently serving as Regional Director, overseeing operations across six countries and more than 1,200 restaurants. Previously, he worked in investment research, structured transactions, and investor relations, and founded his own consulting firm, VF Capital. He holds an MBA from INSEAD.

He is seeking to acquire an established, leading B2B services business operating in a fragmented, steadily growing, and low-cyclicality market. The ideal target should have a proven growth track record, with average annual revenue growth of over 10% over the past three years, annual revenue exceeding R$30 million, and EBITDA above R$10 million, supported by strong cash generation. Particular emphasis is placed on businesses with predictable and recurring revenues, low cancellation rates, and a diversified customer base.

Passionate about improving access to care for rural and underserved populations, Lisa Piercey founded Tristela Capital Partners in 2023. Since then, she has completed three acquisitions of lower-middle-market healthcare companies through traditional search fund, self-funded search, and independent sponsor models. Through NCA, she acquired Keystone Specialty Pharmacy, a wound care specialty pharmacy in Madison, in 2024.

Tristela Capital Partners has just announced the acquisition of Pediatric Group of Acadiana (PGOA) and its affiliated management services organization, Independent Physician Services (IPS). The transaction was financed with debt and equity from True West Capital Partners, alongside another prominent investment firm.

Founded in 1994 and headquartered in Lafayette, Louisiana, PGOA has been one of the largest providers of pediatric primary care to rural and underserved families across South Central Louisiana’s Acadiana region. The group operates 14 outpatient and three inpatient locations, with 33 providers and approximately 130 employees. Dr. Jibran Atwi, PGOA’s founder, will continue seeing patients at the practice and will join Tristela’s board following the transaction.

Lisa explained that her focus now is on expanding access to care, growing and sustaining the business, and building on that foundation to reach communities well beyond those it currently serves.

Legal: Polsinelli / DD: LMBC

Lorenzo Giordano and Alessandro Marchiaro have launched Mediterraneum Investments, a Turin-based search fund established with the goal of acquiring, leading, and developing a single high-potential Italian SME over the long term.

Mediterraneum specifically targets entrepreneurs facing a generational handover or ownership transition who are seeking a solution that ensures continuity for the company, its people, and the industrial project built over time.

Following the search fund model, Giordano and Marchiaro will acquire a single company and assume direct operational responsibility for it, dedicating themselves to its long-term growth and development.

The search fund has raised €650,000 and is backed by a group of Italian and international investors, including Eureka! Venture SGR, Andrea Bernardi, Michele Ventura, Kinderhook Partners, Vonzeo Capital Partners, Orca Equity Partners, Victoriam Equity, Scipio Holding, Celium Capital Partners, Arada Capital Partners, Asta Capital, Gallium Growth, EPA Investissements, Tobias Mohr, and Pitlane Capital.

“Italy is home to an extraordinary wealth of SMEs built over decades by outstanding entrepreneurs. Many of these companies have developed distinctive technical expertise, established client relationships, and leadership positions in their respective market niches,” explain Giordano and Marchiaro. “Our ambition is to find one of these companies and dedicate ourselves fully to its future—preserving what makes it special while bringing in new energy, resources, and an international perspective to support its next phase of growth.”

Mediterraneum Investments seeks resilient, profitable Italian SMEs capable of generating solid cash flows, characterized by a strong competitive position, distinctive know-how, and attractive long-term growth prospects.

The search will focus primarily on three sectors where the founders have gained direct experience and developed established industrial networks: Energy and Industrial Decarbonization; Food Supply Chains and Industrial Processing; and Circular Materials and Environmental Services.

Target companies will typically have an Enterprise Value of between €5 million and €30 million, an established business model, and a recognizable competitive position within their market.

Mediterraneum Investments intends to acquire a single company, in which the founders will directly assume operational and leadership roles, committing to its long-term development. The goal is to build upon the foundations laid by the current entrepreneurs, preserving the company’s wealth of expertise, personnel, and relationships while guiding it through its next phase of growth.

Lorenzo Giordano is an industrial development and energy transition professional with international experience in the energy, infrastructure, automotive, and agritech sectors. His career combines business development, commercial leadership, industrial partnerships, and M&A assessment with operational experience in technology companies. Through roles at Snam and Mitsui & Co., he gained experience in energy infrastructure, sustainable mobility, and international industrial development. He subsequently founded and led an agritech company as CEO, adding direct entrepreneurial and operational experience to his industrial background.

Alessandro Marchiaro is an international entrepreneur and business builder with experience in creating, financing, and growing companies across European markets. His background combines entrepreneurship, strategy, finance, operational management, and business development, with specific expertise in the sustainability and circular economy sectors. As a co-founder of circolution, he contributed to the company’s establishment and international expansion, gaining firsthand experience in the financial, strategic, and operational challenges associated with scaling a business across various European markets.

Both Giordano and Marchiaro come from Italian families of SME entrepreneurs and have built complementary international careers. After spending several years developing and leading projects and businesses abroad, they decided to combine their experience around a shared ambition: returning to Italy to continue their entrepreneurial journey through the acquisition of an Italian SME, building a solid and sustainable long-term future.

In 2023, Troy Minogue, founder of 302 Capital Partners, acquired Canadian Industrial Pumps, a value-added distributor of industrial pumps that also provides technical engineering, consulting, repair and field-service capabilities. The transaction was supported by Sage Capital Partners, Archipelago Capital Partners, Miramar Search Partners and Endurance Search Partners, among others.

Three years later, the company has been sold to HMFT Inc., marking a successful exit for its shareholders. Financial terms were not disclosed. The transaction marks the beginning of Canadian Industrial Pumps’ next phase of growth as part of a larger national strategic platform.

The acquisition expands HMFT’s pump portfolio and adds deeper expertise across mining, infrastructure, water and wastewater, oil and gas, pulp and paper, construction and agriculture. Canadian Industrial Pumps also brings a full-service repair operation capable of handling equipment ranging from small electric pumps to large diesel-driven trailer packages, strengthening HMFT’s ability to support customers throughout the equipment lifecycle.

For HMFT, the acquisition is part of a broader expansion strategy that has already included EC&M Electric, Booth Brothers and ProSpec Technologies. Those transactions have broadened its Canadian fluid-handling and industrial-services offering, while Canadian Industrial Pumps adds greater technical depth and operating coverage in British Columbia.

Industrial distribution remains fragmented, while customers increasingly favour suppliers that can combine product access with engineering, installation, repair and recurring aftermarket support. HMFT is therefore acquiring established technical expertise, manufacturer relationships and local service capabilities in British Columbia rather than building them organically.