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Today’s Rundown

• Serial acquirers index

• RDCP annual letter 2025

• Questions searchers must answer

• 2 deal / launch announcements

Database Overview

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Weekly Highlights

• Alpera Partners released their Serial Acquirers Index:

  • The Alpera Serial Acquirers Index is a proprietary benchmark tracking 500M€–10Bn€ market-cap buy-and-build companies across 7 sectors and 4 geographies in Europe and North America over 10+ years

  • The Index compares long-term performance and valuation of serial acquirers against major public benchmarks including the S&P 500, Russell 2000, Stoxx 600, and MSCI Europe Small Cap to test whether disciplined M&A truly outperforms

  • It was built to address a data gap, as serial acquirers are prevalent across software, industrials, healthcare, and business services but lack consistent, structured performance analysis versus public markets

  • The full report includes index construction methodology, performance and valuation data since December 2019, 10- and 15-year backtests, sector-level breakdowns, and analysis of macro drivers such as interest rates and tech valuations

  • Alpera Partners positions the Index as a practitioner-led research effort, drawing on experience from 75+ acquisitions, €120M+ deployed capital, and multiple active consolidation platforms across essential and fragmented sectors

• Sameer Rizvi, founder of holdco RDCP, published their 2025 annual letter:

  • Over its first decade, RD Capital Partners grew enterprise value from near zero to about $650 million by 2025, delivering a reported 73.9 percent annualized return from 2015–2025, materially outperforming the S&P 500 and FTSE 100 over the same period

  • In 2025 alone, RDCP increased EV by 8 percent through two acquisitions while shifting strategy away from aggressive leverage toward higher equity contribution, faster deleveraging, and stronger group liquidity

  • The portfolio now comprises 10 platform companies, built from 31 investments, generating roughly £160 million in run-rate revenue and £30 million in run-rate EBITDA, with healthcare representing about 39 percent of sector exposure

  • RDCP explicitly frames its evolution as a move from early “cigar-butt” investing toward owning fewer, higher-quality businesses with durable economics, recurring revenue, and strong management teams intended to compound for decades rather than years

  • Key lessons emphasized include liquidity as the primary risk buffer, declining leverage as a governance choice, centralized finance to reduce complexity, and reputation as a compounding asset on par with capital itself

• Chris von Wedemeyer, founder of search fund investor Legacy Partners, shared questions every searcher must answer before they chase a deal:

  • Before chasing deals or modeling returns, a searcher must accept the possibility of restarting their net-worth story with years of concentrated, illiquid risk tied to a single business

  • Search is fundamentally a lifestyle commitment where you inherit a calendar, people problems, and emotional load rather than just a financial asset

  • The defining advantage of successful searchers is clarity about what they want their life to look like over the next three to seven years, not superior courage or intelligence

  • Real risk in search shows up as ongoing stress, lender oversight, personal guarantees, and uncontrollable shocks rather than abstract downside scenarios in pitch decks

  • Answering these questions honestly before raising capital or signing an LOI prevents costly misalignment and creates conviction when the right opportunity finally appears

Deal / Launch Announcements

• 🇪🇸 Divisadero Capital, a search fund managed by Fernando Garcia-G Benavides, acquired VisualCounter, a precision-analytics company (link)

• 🇪🇸 Preludio Partners, a search fund managed by Andres Garrido and Curro Fita, announced their acquisition (link)

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