Three Floridian dealmakers recently working at Aurelius Group, Fairmont Partners and H.I.G. Capital have teamed up to launch a Miami-based firm to invest in special situations on a deal by deal basis.
Matias Campiani, until recently VP of new business development at European buyout firm Aurelius Group, Valerio Forte, until recently head of the business development team at buyout firm H.I.G. Capital, and Martin Wentzel, most recently a founding partner at independent sponsor and consulting firm Fairmont Partners LLC, have formed Profondas Capital.
“We would love to expand quickly and have a lot of deal flow and a big team soon,” said Partner Wentzel in an interview with Private Equity Career News. For now, the partners are open to hiring interns. They would look to bring aboard their first associate or vice president once they get another couple of deals under their belts.
The Strategy: As for that, the independent sponsor plans to make control investments in North American and European companies generating $20 million to $200 million in revenue in manufacturing, healthcare, technology and consumer goods. By and large the firm will target complex, special situations. These include companies with vast room to improve operationally, companies in financial distress, and corporate carve-outs where significant resources must be deployed to extract and stabilize the businesses. They will also target companies that for other reasons make them hard to sell. “We’re not looking where everybody else is,” said Forte. “We’re looking where there are gaps in interest” by other buyers.
The Founders: Along with sourcing deals for Aurelius Group, Campiani co-founded Welwaze Medical and until 2019 served as CEO. The Miami-based company makes a device used in the early detection of breast cancer; it will be managed as a portfolio company of Profondas Capital. Forte, along with building and leading the BD team at prolific H.I.G. Capital from 2007 to early 2023, has recently served as founder and CCO of Traiverse. The company provides executive coaching and related talent services to small companies. Wentzel since 2017 has served as founding partner of Fairmont Partners, whose business served as a template for Profondas Capital. Fairmont Partners is effectively being folded into the new firm. Earlier in his career Wentzel worked for more than a decade at Munich, German-based Siemens Corporation, including as director of mergers and acquisitions.
The Portfolio: Along with Welwaze Medical, the portfolio includes Richmond, Virginia-based Filtrona Tapes, which makes the “Supastrip” plastic strips used to open bubble gum packages, Amazon boxes, and other product packages. (Fairmont Partners acquired the business about a month ago before folding it into the Profondas Capital portfolio.) The partners consider it a good example of the kinds of deals they will do. It’s a corporate carveout from a PE-backed filtration products company that considered the tapes business, though profitable, too small and non-core to hold on to. The fact that tobacco companies comprise a good portion of the customer base kept many other would-be bidders away. Meantime, Profondas Capital also took over ownership and management of another business acquired by Fairmont Partners. Bad Soden-Salmünster, Germany-based Schön Industrietechnik GmbH & Co. KG supplies rubber and plastic parts to automotive, industrial and healthcare companies.
The Financing: The partners have assembled a fluid investor base of family offices, funded sponsors, private debt funds. They don’t plan to raise a committed fund. They believe that the independent sponsor model is the best fit for their style of investing, where not every deal will appeal to every backer and where some deals won’t require equity.