$5 – $40M
Three durability traits. Four sectors of focus. One deal box. Industry matters less than the model, but here is how we sort the reading list.
We have evaluated businesses across very different sectors. The pattern in the ones we get excited about is the same.
You compete on what you do, not what you charge. It usually shows up as healthy gross margins and the ability to raise price modestly without losing customers.
The same customers, year after year. Renewal rates that are quietly excellent. Word-of-mouth doing most of the marketing for you.
Long average tenures. People who came in junior and grew into the company. A team you would want to inherit, because we will inherit it.
We do not specialize by sector. We specialize by the durability of the model. But four areas are where our team has the most direct credibility to add value: where we have either grown up in the work, run businesses inside it, or invested through full cycles.
Essential, recession-resistant, and overwhelmingly owned by founders reaching retirement age with no clear succession path. Modern dispatch software, structured technician career paths, and disciplined add-on M&A are turning good local operators into regional platforms. The window is real, and it is open now.
Our board has invested in and operated field-services businesses across multiple cycles. Rick Gustafson was CFO of ServiceMax, the leading field service management platform, acquired by GE Digital. Kent Weaver, through Granite Point, has backed field-services platforms including Fieldedge (field-technician software). Our founder also grew up adjacent to the work: VDRS, his family's company, runs a field-maintenance arm that services equipment on-site at major recycling facilities across North America. When we read a trades CIM, we read it with context about technicians, dispatch, ticket margin, and the rhythms of an on-call business that most generalist buyers do not have.
Long-tenured customer relationships, recurring service revenue, and tightening regulation, combined with a long tail of regional family-owned operators, make this one of the most under-institutionalized sectors at our size band. The right businesses here have multi-decade customer relationships and quietly excellent unit economics.
Our founder grew up inside an environmental services business. His family's company, VDRS, designs, installs, and maintains the equipment that powers many of the largest recycling facilities in North America. We did not learn this sector from a deck. We learned it at the dinner table.
Three decades of structural demand growth, fragmented provider economics, and an increasingly complex payor and regulatory environment generate repeated opportunity at our size. The investments that work share three traits: payor-mix discipline, scalable clinical operations, and management teams who already know the work.
Our founder spent his investing career at TPG focused on healthcare services. Selected investments include Medical Solutions (a nurse-staffing platform that became the largest privately-held in the United States during the holding period), Implantable Provider Group (a payor-services platform that moved complex device procedures into lower-cost settings), and CHEA (Centers for Health Education and Access), which owned and operated two accredited osteopathic medical schools (Idaho College of Osteopathic Medicine and Burrell College of Osteopathic Medicine). Our board includes operators currently running healthcare services companies.
Compliance vendors are recurring-revenue, customer-embedded, and benefit asymmetrically from regulatory complexity. Every new regime is a tailwind. Customers do not casually switch compliance vendors, which makes the well-run businesses in this category unusually durable.
We currently partner with Alternative Regulatory Solutions (alternativereg.com), a compliance platform serving financial-services firms. Our investment associate Jack Costello brings additional sector experience from advising large financial institutions on regulatory operating models prior to joining Aetherion.
Telling you what we will not pursue saves both of us time. We do not invest in:
If your business is none of those, we'd like to read about it. The size band is a guide, not a fence. Write anyway.
There is no template, no NDA up front, no information request. Write a letter — three paragraphs is fine — about what the company does, how it makes money, and what you are thinking about for what comes next. We reply to every letter we receive. If there is fit, we will tell you. If there is not, we will tell you that too, and tell you why.
Send the teaser, the CIM, or a one-pager. We will respond inside 48 hours with a yes, a no, or a question. We do not collect deals we cannot act on. We pay broker fees in line with market on closed deals. If the company is in the box above, we are in.
Whether you are an owner thinking about what comes next, or an advisor representing one, we want to hear from you. We answer every letter we receive.
contact@aetheriongrp.com →