Private Equity

Ambienta targets niche European SMEs driven by environmental themes, with scalable and profitable business models, growing international end-markets and strong and differentiated market positions.

We leverage our local presence and connectivity to identify hard to access European SMEs. Our companies provide services or products that utilise resources more efficiently or reduce pollution, supported by a secular tail-wind of growth. We are a majority-oriented investor and we empower our management teams, who invest alongside us to ensure full alignment of interests. We like working with entrepreneurs and family businesses: primary transactions account for over 90% of our investments.

We aim to deliver top tier financial returns alongside solid and measured Environmental Impact through our proprietary methodology, the Environmental Impact Analysis (EIA).

Investment approach

Investment criteria

Market characteristics

Growing international end markets with strong environmental drivers

Business models

Proven, international and scalable businesses with low capital intensity

Company characteristics

  • Niche market leaders
  • Mission critical or cost advantageous products or services
  • Attractive financials: growth, good profitability, strong cash conversion

 

Typical transaction

Transaction types

Buy-outs, growth capital, family successions, corporate spin-offs, buy & build projects, no start-ups

Enterprise value

€100 to €300 m

Equity investments size

€50 to €200 m

Ownership

Strong preference for majority positions

 

Company engagement

Value creation

  • Organisational strengthening
  • Consolidation / add-ons
  • International growth
  • ESG integration

 

Why we are the right partner

Through industry knowledge, reliable commitment and effective execution, Ambienta has built a track record of over 15 years of successful partnership with M&A advisors, entrepreneurs and managers.

Our success in investing in European SMEs is based on four pillars:

We leverage local relationships to source family/entrepreneur owned SMEs. Since inception, Ambienta has continued to build out its geographical footprint, with four offices across Europe’s core industrial belt: Milan, London, Paris and Munich. Through these offices we are able to deepen our extensive Industrial Network and connectivity within each local market.

With a diversified professional background spanning from industrial to consulting and entrepreneurial experiences, our team is proud of being a value-added partner that can provide strategic and operational value beyond pure financial support. Ambienta, through local offices, industrial expertise and a network of industry experts across a range of markets, is able to provide access to resources and opportunities otherwise not available to management and entrepreneurs.

Our team has repeatedly been able to build trusting, long-term relationships with founders and entrepreneurs through a shared culture and collective entrepreneurial values.

Our dedicated Sustainability & Strategy team continually maps the effects of environmental trends across sectors and value chains: there is a continual research-led, deep-dive analytical approach to evaluating the universe of companies that fall within Ambienta’s primary target markets.

How we create value

We typically target businesses that have experienced rapid growth but have not been built for scale, lacking the necessary infrastructure and platform to sustain a new phase of significant expansion.

In order to maximise value, we support the development of our portfolio companies by concentrating our focus on five central drivers of performance post-acquisition.

We invest in SME businesses and aim to transition them from founder/entrepreneur owned and led into solid organisations with well-developed internal structures and processes.

We leverage our team’s private equity, consulting and industrial expertise to identify strategic and operational levers that will catalyse sustainable long-term growth and enhance margins.

We specialise in buy & build projects where we target fragmented market niches and, starting from a platform company, we consolidate the market with serial add-on acquisitions.

Driving internationalisation of portfolio companies is a central part of Ambienta’s investment approach. We focus on companies with products that are internationally scalable and leverage our international footprint to capture growth opportunities in rapidly expanding international end markets.

Ambienta is a leader in ESG integration, aligning its investment and value creation strategy with best-in-class ESG principles and practices.  Our proprietary ESG in Action programme, applied consistently across operations, is integral to our investment process and to fulfil our transparency and reporting duties toward our investors.

ESG in Action programme

How we measure impact

We apply our proprietary methodology, the Environmental Impact Analysis (EIA), to assess the Environmental Impact of our private portfolio companies and measure the attainment of our sustainable investment objective through 11 Environmental Metrics.


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