As Fulcrum Equity Partners closed its fourth fund, an oversubscribed and totaling $275 million, Frank Dalton and Tom Greer spoke to Hypepotamus about what this means for the future of the firm.
“With our fund size, we’re now able to become a pretty strong financial partner,” said Dalton. The team says this will mean the ability to write checks from $5 million to upwards of $30 million over the life of an investment.
On the healthcare side, the firm focuses its investments on multi-site services, outsourcing services, and healthcare IT startups. The healthcare services companies in which Fulcrum invests typically have $1-10M EBITDA, and HCIT companies typically are between $3-20M in revenue.
The firm also invests in growing B2B SaaS startups and tech-enabled services. The Atlanta-based firm has backed local startups including GoPivot, Florence, SaaSOptics, LiveSource, and MFG.
Fund IV includes nearly 100% participation from previous institutional investors, with the addition of key, longtime C-level executives, according to a statement released by Fulcrum.
For Dalton, this new fund validates the team’s growth strategy since its founding in 2005. “When we started to fund, we really wanted to target CEOs and high net worth individuals that had been there before. We started with well over 100 CEOs from all kinds of industries. But as we got a little bit larger and more successful, we were able to attract more of an institutional base. So now we have a blend of high net worth individuals, some institutions, universities, and family offices.”
Fund IV, the firm’s largest to date, ushers in a new chapter for the team.
“A year ago today, we really dropped everything in focus on all of our portfolio companies to make sure that they had enough liquidity, and especially our healthcare businesses because they were struggling just to find enough equipment to be able to give to their employees,” Greer told Hypepotamus.
“We worked very closely with all of our management teams to secure PPP funding for those that qualified for it and reassured our lenders that were involved with the companies and that the company had enough liquidity. We really solidified those businesses during what was really a very dark time. Coming out of COVID, a lot of those businesses have fully recovered, even the health care companies are back above pre-COVID levels.”
The team has already started deploying capital from Fund IV, with investments in Atlanta-based mobile device testing company Kobiton, Durham-based AdTech startup Kevel, and Birmingham-based healthcare company Proxsys Rx.
Photo by Michael Denning on Unsplash
