Minimums from $25,000 · 1,400+ accredited investors · No fund commitment
CapitalPad for Investors
Review acquisitions of established, profitable small businesses one at a time, each presented with complete diligence materials: historical financials, deal structure, investor terms, and a recorded interview with the acquirer. Invest where a deal earns it, and decline the rest.
Minimums from $25,000 per deal.
CapitalPad for Acquirers
CapitalPad invests $500K to $2.5M of equity per transaction, depending on deal type, behind independent sponsors and searchers acquiring established companies under LOI. One SPV, one wire, one line on the cap table.
Acquirers pay nothing at any stage.
CapitalPad for Investors
Quality SMB deal flow rarely reaches individual investors. The acquisitions are sourced through operator relationships, funded by family offices and private groups, and closed without ever reaching a wider audience. CapitalPad puts those transactions in front of accredited investors, one at a time, each underwritten before presentation.
Every deal is an established, historically profitable company, led by an independent sponsor or searcher who will operate it after close. Members review each acquisition on its own merits and commit only to the deals they choose.
Financial history, customer concentration, industry durability, and the acquirer’s track record, reviewed before anything is shown. Fewer than 5% of the deals CapitalPad evaluates are presented to members.
Structures vary by transaction: preferred equity, distribution plans, reporting cadence. Whatever a deal carries is disclosed in its deal room before capital is committed, and each transaction stands alone.
No fund commitment, no scheduled capital calls, no obligation attached to approval. Individuals participate from $25,000 per deal through one SPV.
CapitalPad invests only in SMB and lower middle market acquisitions: independent sponsor transactions, search funds, and self-funded search deals. Nothing else competes for attention.
Rather than a dozen individual investors with a dozen signature packages, the CapitalPad vehicle closes as one: a single subscription package and a single wire, with the investor base consolidated behind it.
Acquirers pay CapitalPad nothing, whether or not the transaction closes. The economics come from carried interest paid by CapitalPad’s own investors.
CapitalPad for Acquirers
CapitalPad backs independent sponsors and searchers acquiring established U.S. and Canadian companies, investing $500K to $2.5M of equity per transaction depending on deal type. The typical target runs $1M to $7M of EBITDA at $5M to $30M of enterprise value.
A deal under LOI receives a read on fit within a few business days, and every co-investor arrives as one entity at closing.
There are no fees to acquirers at any stage.
CapitalPad for Investors
“CapitalPad makes the deal sourcing and logistics of lower middle market investing easy.”
CapitalPad for Investors
“CapitalPad makes the deal sourcing and logistics of lower middle market investing easy.”
CapitalPad for Acquirers
“CapitalPad’s investment was invaluable for helping close our transaction. Highly recommended for searchers.”
CapitalPad for Acquirers
“CapitalPad’s investment was invaluable for helping close our transaction. Highly recommended for searchers.”
The team behind CapitalPad has bought, operated, and sold small businesses, invested institutionally, and worked through 50+ lower middle market transactions. SMB acquisition is the entire practice.
Backed acquisitions span business services, healthcare, home services, and light manufacturing, each an established company purchased by the operator now running it.
SMB investing means providing capital for the acquisition of small and medium-sized businesses: established, profitable companies purchased by an operator who will run them. CapitalPad’s deals run $1M to $7M of EBITDA, the range where a company can support passive outside investors. It sits between angel investing and traditional private equity, with real cash-flowing companies rather than startups, at smaller check sizes and entry multiples than institutional buyouts.
The acquirer does. CapitalPad backs deals led by independent sponsors and searchers who step into ownership or the CEO seat at close. Members hold passive positions behind the operator.
Participation is limited to accredited investors and institutions that complete onboarding and verification. Individual minimums start at $25,000 per deal, and institutional allocations begin at $750,000.
Approved members see each opportunity in the dashboard with its diligence file: financial statements and tax returns, the deal memo, structure and investor terms, sources and uses, the post-close plan, and a recorded interview with the acquirer.
Members review, ask questions, and request an allocation. Capital is collected near close and subscription documents follow.
Small companies carry concentrated risk: key employees, customer concentration, owner transition, and leverage all matter more at this size. Deals can underperform, distributions can pause, and a failed company can mean a total loss on that investment. These are also illiquid positions with no secondary market.
Members should only allocate capital they can hold for years and afford to lose on any single deal.
They are not. Expect a multi-year hold, typically 3 to 7 years, with most of any return arriving at exit. Interim distributions occur on some deals but are never assured.
A one-time 1.5% administration fee per investment and 20% carried interest with a 100% return-of-capital hurdle, meaning carry accrues only after a deal has returned members’ capital in full. There is no annual management fee.
Institutions investing $750,000 or more directly pay no carry.
CapitalPad does not provide personalized investment advice or recommendations. All information made available through this website, including materials related to potential investment opportunities, is for informational purposes only and is not authored or guaranteed by CapitalPad.
Investors acknowledge and accept the inherent risks of investing in private securities, including the risk of a total loss of invested capital. Past performance of any entity, individual, or investment strategy is not indicative of, and does not guarantee, future results. Any forward-looking statements or projections are hypothetical in nature, may not materialize, and should not be relied upon as a guarantee of future performance.
Investors are solely responsible for conducting their own independent due diligence prior to making any investment decision. Investments made through CapitalPad are speculative, illiquid, not FDIC-insured, not bank-guaranteed, and may lose value. There may be no secondary market for these securities.
Investments may also involve limited or no voting rights. Investors should assume that they will not have influence over the management or operations of the underlying entity.
By participating, investors acknowledge that all investments involve significant risk and that neither CapitalPad nor its affiliates make any representation, warranty, or guarantee as to the performance of any investment.
An executed LOI or late-stage diligence, an established U.S. or Canadian company earning $1M to $7M of EBITDA with a demonstrated history of profitability, stable revenue with manageable customer concentration, and an acquirer prepared to operate the business. Terms should be market-standard for the structure. Startups, turnarounds, and distressed situations are outside the mandate.
Nothing, at any stage, whether or not the transaction closes. CapitalPad earns carried interest from its own investors.
Initial feedback on fit within a few business days of receiving the LOI and core materials. Firm commitments follow diligence, and thirty or more days of runway before close typically supports a larger allocation.
$500K to $2.5M directly, depending on deal type, with funds, family offices, and SBICs in the investor base writing $750,000+ direct checks alongside the vehicle on larger raises.
As involved as the acquirer wants. Some pull the team in on add-on evaluation or operating questions; others prefer a quiet check with standard reporting. Either works.
SMB investing means buying equity in small and medium-sized businesses: established, historically profitable companies purchased by an operator who intends to run them. These are lower middle market and Main Street companies (HVAC contractors, IT managed services firms, healthcare practices, specialty distributors, B2B service providers), and the category is sometimes called micro private equity. The companies are already built. The investment case rests on durable demand, a fair purchase price, sensible debt, and the person taking over.
Size defines what is investable. Small businesses exist at every scale, but below roughly $1M of EBITDA a company is usually too dependent on its owner to support passive outside capital; those transactions work for a buyer taking the operating seat, not for investors who stay out of it. The investable range for non-operating investors begins around $1M of EBITDA and runs through the lower middle market.
It occupies a distinct middle ground. Compared with angel investing, the underlying companies have years of financial history and existing cash flow. Compared with institutional private equity, the checks are smaller, the entry multiples typically lower, and the transactions simple enough for a single operator to lead.
A large share of U.S. small businesses are owned by baby boomer founders at or near retirement age, and many have no internal successor. When those owners sell, the buyer is often not a corporation or a fund but an individual acquirer backed by outside capital. That succession pipeline, sometimes called the silver tsunami, is steady, national, and what produces SMB acquisition deal flow.
The acquirers fall into a few recognizable groups, under the umbrella often called entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA). Search fund entrepreneurs raise capital to find and buy one company, then run it as CEO. Self-funded searchers pay for their own search and raise equity only at the point of acquisition. Independent sponsors are private equity professionals who structure transactions individually without a committed fund, governing at the board level rather than the operating seat, frequently through buy-and-build strategies with add-on acquisitions. A fourth group, holding companies, acquires with permanent capital and no planned exit, and rarely raises outside equity deal by deal.
Collectively the first three are often called acquisition entrepreneurs, and they are the operating engine of the asset class: the investor provides capital, the acquirer provides the career. Across all of them, the underwriting decision is the same, a specific operator buying a specific company at a specific price.
A typical transaction combines several layers: senior debt, often an SBA 7(a) loan at the smaller end of the range, frequently a seller note, and an equity layer that commonly covers 30 to 50% of the purchase price. A quality of earnings review is standard diligence, with customer concentration and the working capital peg examined alongside price. Investors usually receive preferred equity with a liquidation preference, reporting rights, and approval rights over major decisions, while the acquirer holds common equity and earns more of it through performance. Sellers frequently finance part of their own sale or roll over a minority stake, which keeps them aligned with the business through transition.
Venture capital follows a power law: it underwrites the possibility that a young company becomes large, most positions fail, and a few outliers carry the portfolio. SMB investing underwrites the continuation of a company that already works: existing revenue, existing profits, existing customers, priced as a multiple of current EBITDA rather than a projection of future revenue. Returns come from cash flow, debt paydown, operational improvement, and eventual sale rather than from finding an outlier, and some deals produce distributions during the hold, which venture almost never does. The distribution of outcomes is tighter in both directions, with fewer total losses than venture and fewer thousand-fold outcomes, and the failure modes tie more to execution and ownership transition than to product risk.
Institutional private equity buys larger companies, typically $10M or more of EBITDA, through committed funds with multi-year lockups and seven-figure minimums. SMB investing operates below that threshold, where competition is thinner and entry multiples typically sit lower. Deal-by-deal structures replace the blind pool: an investor evaluates the specific company, the specific operator, and the specific terms before committing anything.
The best long-run public data comes from the search fund segment, which the Stanford GSB Search Fund Study has tracked since 1984, with current figures from the Stanford and IESE studies on the search fund statistics page. The aggregate returns those studies report compare favorably with most private market strategies, but they are dollar-weighted, lifted by exceptional exits, and dispersion between deals is wide.
The risks are specific. SMBs carry key person risk in the acquirer and often in the departing founder, customer concentration is common at this size, leverage cuts both ways, and the equity is illiquid until an exit or recapitalization. Deal selection and operator quality matter more here than in asset classes where diversification does the work.
SMB acquisitions are private placements under Regulation D, open to accredited investors, and historically they were never listed anywhere an outside investor could find them. There are three practical paths: buying a company outright, which is a career rather than an investment; committing to a fund, which pools deals but removes deal-level choice; or co-investing deal by deal in underwritten acquisitions, which preserves selection while a screening layer handles sourcing and structure.
CapitalPad operates the third path. CapitalPad is a private equity co-investment group where accredited investors invest in SMB acquisitions one deal at a time. Members back search funds, self-funded searchers, and independent sponsors across the major SMB asset classes, rather than committing to a blind-pool fund. Every deal CapitalPad presents is post-LOI with a complete diligence package. Investing starts at $25,000 per deal, and fewer than 5% of the transactions reviewed are presented. Accredited investors can Apply for Access to review live deals.
