The search fund model at scale: reading the Stanford 2026 Primer
The latest Stanford Primer documents a decade of growth and professionalisation. The headline number is that the model has more than doubled in size without giving up its returns.
Post-acquisition: where reality begins
A panel at the IE Search Funds Summit 2025 on what actually happens after the deal closes — the transition with former owners, the first hundred days, and the governance that has to be built from nothing.
Search funds in Spain: professionalisation and strategic investment
A forum convened by CMS Albiñana & Suárez de Lezo brought together investors and searchers who have completed the full cycle. The consensus: the Spanish market has matured, and with maturity has come competition.
29 insights
The search fund model at scale: reading the Stanford 2026 Primer
The latest Stanford Primer documents a decade of growth and professionalisation. The headline number is that the model has more than doubled in size without giving up its returns.
Post-acquisition: where reality begins
A panel at the IE Search Funds Summit 2025 on what actually happens after the deal closes — the transition with former owners, the first hundred days, and the governance that has to be built from nothing.
Search funds in Spain: professionalisation and strategic investment
A forum convened by CMS Albiñana & Suárez de Lezo brought together investors and searchers who have completed the full cycle. The consensus: the Spanish market has matured, and with maturity has come competition.
Arada expands in Italy with the acquisition of New Roglass
Through the search fund Cassandra Investments, Arada has acquired a Milan-based glass recycling business with €10.5m in sales and a 20% EBITDA margin. It is the seventh investment of Arada CP I and the second in Italy.
Altera Transmission: a responsible handover for a French SME
Ghislaine Alami has launched a French search fund built around a specific idea — that succession is a transfer of responsibility, not just of shares. Arada is among fifteen entrepreneur-investors backing her search.
In search of a boring business
The New York Times turned its attention to the investors buying plumbing firms and industrial cleaners. Our reading of why the unglamorous end of the market has become the interesting one.
Boost growth and sustain legacy: the first year after acquisition
The transformation of an SME acquired through a search fund runs in three phases. This is our view on the first — the year in which the goal is not to change the business but to understand it.
The growth of search funds and Arada's vision
Javier Puig joined the Capital Alternativo podcast to discuss the firm's investment model, why search fund returns have held up, and where the European market goes from here.
Arada continues its expansion with new acquisitions across Europe
Two acquisitions — ELTI in Italy and ADINOR in Spain — plus two newly financed search funds. Six companies and more than twenty search funds in under two years of the investment period.
Hg enters Spain through Ctaima, four years after a search fund bought it
A $70bn technology investor taking a stake in a company acquired by a Spanish search fund in 2020 is the clearest signal yet of where this asset class now sits in the exit landscape.
ELTI: our first Italian company
Visconti Capital has acquired ELTI, a Rome-based leader in building infrastructure certification with €15m of revenue and a 40% EBITDA margin. Mandatory, recurring inspections in a fragmented market.
The first 100 days managing Effisus: a co-CEO journey
Miguel Costa Freire and Pablo Alvarez Guerra on what they got right and what they rushed in their first months running the Portuguese company they acquired.
Are searchers gravitating towards larger companies?
Team composition has historically driven target size. As the model matures and institutional investors arrive, the acquisition spectrum is widening — and with it the complexity searchers have to handle.
Effisus: our first investment in Portugal
Through Viriato Capital, Arada has taken a stake in a Portuguese multinational whose waterproofing systems are on the Apple headquarters, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and the Santiago Bernabéu.
Starting a search fund: motivations, fundraising and the cap table
Fernando García Benavides on the groundwork that has to happen before the PPM, and on how he thought about assembling the right group of investors rather than simply the available one.
LIBNOVA wins the 2023 European Technology Award for R&D
Three months after the acquisition, our portfolio company was named best European technology company in research and development at a ceremony in Paris.
SEARCHFUNDED podcast: a conversation with Javier Puig
On search funds as an asset class, the founding of Arada Capital Partners, and how the firm thinks about its investment strategy.
Arcadio Investments acquires LIBNOVA, a global leader in digital preservation
After evaluating more than a thousand Spanish companies, Jacobo Vera has acquired a business whose clients include the British Library, CERN and the US Department of Energy.
The consolidation of search funds as an asset class
An interview with Capital & Corporate on why the model has moved from curiosity to established allocation, and what it offers investors and searchers respectively.
Search funds whet investor appetite
Capital & Corporate examined how the model connects experienced entrepreneurs with investors, and why Spain has become one of the leading markets globally.
SME growth and financing through the search fund model
Arada joined Foro Capital Pymes to discuss the model's impact on small and medium-sized companies in Spain, alongside Pleamar Partners and the CEO of one of our first investments.
Arada completes first closing with a portfolio of 14 search funds
Commitments reaching close to 60% of a €15m target, fourteen search funds across four geographies, and a first portfolio company. The end of Arada's first year.
Entrepreneurship through the acquisition of an established company
Rather than building from zero, a searcher continues what already works. An argument for why acquiring beats founding in an environment of rising rates.
CNMV approves Arada Capital Partners
The regulator has cleared the launch of the vehicle, which begins fundraising this month with a target of €15m and a plan to acquire around twenty European SMEs through search funds.
Investing in growth and adding value: the search fund model
Thirty-five years of history in the United States, a much shorter one in Europe — and a Spanish ecosystem that has become the largest on the continent.
ESG as a key criterion for long-term investment
For a holding period measured in years rather than quarters, ESG stops being a reporting exercise and becomes a driver of value — and SMEs can move faster on it than large companies.
Arcadio Investments launches to facilitate generational handover in SMEs
Jacobo Vera has launched a search fund targeting Spanish companies with €5–20m of revenue, backed from the outset by Arada and more than twenty other investors.
IESMAT: Arada Capital Partners' first acquisition
Our first company. Through Signatus Capital, led by Enrique Sales, we have acquired a Madrid-based scientific instrumentation business with more than fifteen years in the sector.
Support, guide, mentor and invest
What we actually do for the search funds we back, across the search, the acquisition and the years of ownership that follow.
The wider ecosystem
Research centres and programmes that shape the search fund model.
