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Hampton River Partners

Backing this generation's foundational serial acquirers

Hampton River is a long term investment firm dedicated to building and scaling operator led serial acquirers across Europe and the United States. We partner with exceptional leaders and give them the capital, structure, and long-duration mandate to compound at the highest levels.

What we do

• Back world class capital allocators and operators 

• Provide capital, disciplined M&A frameworks, and playbooks for methodical capital allocation

• Help founders accelerate from first deal to multi company groups 

• Active today across Europe and the United States

Who we back

• Experienced, gritty leaders from best in class serial acquirers and other relevant firms who can hit the ground running and stay the course for the long road

• Investor operator minds with deep networks

• Data driven, equity-efficient, frugal MOIC maximizers who value self sustainability

If you want to build a serial acquirer… we want to meet you.
Contact us!

Today’s Rundown

• Playbook on Shopify’s services economy

• Four honest questions for aspiring searchers

• Women in search funds 2025 study

• 3 deal / launch announcements

Weekly Highlights

• Road To Carry Newsletter published a playbook on PE’s backdoor eComm play: Shopify’s services economy:

  • Despite weak consumer sentiment, U.S. e-commerce spend hit records in 2025 - $11.8B on Black Friday (+9% YoY) and $44.2B across Thanksgiving–Cyber Monday (+7.7% YoY) - with Shopify powering 30%+ of U.S. online retail and an ecosystem where partners generate 7× Shopify’s own revenue

  • Shopify’s professional-services universe has become a PE target because ecosystem revenue already exceeds $6.9B (vs. Shopify’s ~$1.5B in 2019), agencies often post 50%+ delivery margins and 15–25% EBITDA margins, and repeat/recurring revenue can reach 70%+ through CRO, feature rollouts, and marketing retainers

  • Two PE playbooks dominate:

    • (1) Multi-platform integrators like Blue Acorn, acquired by Infosys for $125M (~3× revenue) after expanding across Adobe, Salesforce, and Shopify

    • (2) Pure-play Shopify platforms like Domaine, now serving 100+ brands after European expansion and positioned for scale-driven valuation premiums.

  • Valuation ranges reflect maturity with small agencies (<$5M EBITDA) trade at 5–7×, mid-market firms at 8–12×, and scaled platforms (> $15M) at 12–15×+, supported by global SIs (Accenture, Infosys, Cognizant) aggressively acquiring rather than building Shopify capability

  • Key risks come from human-capital intensity (talent scarcity), platform dependency (Shopify roadmap changes), and client concentration (>30–40% revenue from a few customers), but leading firms mitigate these with blended onshore/offshore delivery, early-access partnerships with Shopify, and shifting mix toward retainer-based managed services

• Kaustubh Deo, owner of Big Deal Small Business, shared four questions to ask yourself as a searcher:

  • Interest in ETA has surged despite a tougher financing environment, implying that SBA rates doubled from ~5.25% (Feb 2022) to 10.5% (2023–2024), readership of the author’s blog still grew from ~1,500 to ~7,000 - yet he estimates <1% of aspiring searchers ever close a deal

  • Currently, two negative outcomes dominate ETA:

    • (1) Spending 12–24 months and $25–50K in deal costs without closing (more common and often driven by misalignment between personal risk tolerance and the reality of personally guaranteed debt)

    • (2) Closing a bad deal

  • Searchers must confront the downside math: a failed acquisition can mean a 7-year reset (2 years searching, 3 years running into the ground, 2 years bankruptcy unwind); if starting at age 32, you may be 39 and rebuilding net worth from zero - a scenario that must be emotionally acceptable before pursuing ETA

  • Operating a small business is an “all-of-life” endeavor, with stress infiltrating evenings, weekends, and parenting; lukewarm support is sufficient for a job change, but not for ETA, where the owner’s emotional load directly affects the household

  • Ensure you’re running toward small business ownership (not merely fleeing corporate life), and assess whether you thrive in people-dependent, often lonely leadership roles - because small businesses succeed or fail based on the owner’s ability to build, manage, and retain a team, not on financial modeling alone

• Women’s Search Network published their women in search funds 2025 study:

  • The 2025 dataset includes 71 female searchers/CEOs, bringing the cumulative multi-year count to 171 women in ETA; activity to date spans 133 searches launched, 68 acquisitions, and 10 exits, confirming a steadily expanding pipeline

  • Women in ETA mirror broader search demographics: roughly three-quarters launched between ages 26–35, nearly 90% have a business-school background, and recent cohorts show growing pre-search experience in sales (~20%) and entrepreneurship (~23%)

  • Traditional search remains the dominant model, with ~65% raising a funded search, ~18% self-funding, and ~11% pursuing evergreen/holdco structures; more recent searchers are notably more thesis-driven, with ~75% targeting specific industries vs. just over half in prior years

  • Among 68 completed acquisitions, about one-third fall in healthcare (providers + services), followed by software and B2B services

  • Female operating CEOs report high fulfillment and strong impact motivation but also heavier operational intensity: sales and revenue generation consume the largest share of weekly time, and satisfaction levels are highest around mission/impact and personal growth while lowest around stress and time management - highlighting the demanding emotional load of SMB leadership

Deal / Launch Announcements

• 🇩🇪 Timo Cochrane and Jakob Gasmann launched AndCompany, an IT-service buy & build play (link)

• 🇫🇷 Kaeron, a search fund managed by Frédéric Schilling, acquired Groupe Jordan, a HVAC business (link)

• 🇵🇹 Rafael Herrmann de Castro Camargo launched Pharus Succession, a sector-agnostic search fund (link)

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