We partner with founders, entrepreneurs and management teams to accelerate growth, build category-leading businesses, and create lasting enterprise value.
About Us
We invest in North American industrial manufacturing, services and distribution businesses, driving transformational growth through strategic add-on acquisitions, commercial expansion, organizational development and technology deployment & AI.
Gatespan Capital Partners is a specialist private equity sponsor focused exclusively on the lower middle market industrial sector.
Building niche market leading industrial businesses in partnership with founders, entrepreneurs and management teams.
Our MissionStrategy
We target Buy & Build investment opportunities in lower middle market manufacturing, services and distribution businesses across industrial end markets.
We seek to Buy well-positioned companies possessing unique capabilities in attractive markets with a fragmented set of competitors. We seek to Build those platforms through a disciplined value creation approach, investing behind the businesses and management teams we partner with.
Investment Criteria
Revenue of $10–$50 million and EBITDA of $2–$10 million. Lower middle market businesses with meaningful scale and growth runway.
Preference for majority control investments that allow us to partner closely with management and drive strategic direction.
Founder, family and privately-owned businesses seeking liquidity, management transition, or strategic capital to drive transformational growth.
Value Creation
Focus Areas
Our industrial focus is intentional and deep. We invest across a defined set of industrial end markets where our team has accumulated decades of expertise, relationships and pattern recognition.
Why Gatespan
With over four decades of combined middle market private equity investing experience across a multitude of industrial businesses and end markets, we bring expertise, focus, relationships and capital to help lower middle market businesses reach their full potential.
We move quickly and decisively — because as founders and owners ourselves, we know that timing matters. We have spent our careers working alongside entrepreneurs, and we deeply value the culture, teams, and businesses they have built.
We offer the best of both worlds: the experience and rigor of a top-tier institutional firm, without the administrative burden, rigid processes, or misaligned incentives that often come with it.
We are investors who have spent our careers partnering with industrial businesses and the management teams who run them.
Leadership
John Malloy is a Founder and Managing Partner of Gatespan Capital Partners. Having grown up in a family-owned business, John developed an early appreciation for what it takes to build and grow a company, along with a passion for partnering with entrepreneurs who lead lower middle market businesses. With more than two decades of experience as an industrial sector specialist investor, John brings deep experience working alongside founders and family-owned businesses through ownership transitions to build niche market leaders.
Prior to founding Gatespan, John was a Partner at Industrial Growth Partners (IGP), an industrial specialist private equity firm, where he led the firm's industrial technology investments spanning high-reliability electronics, analytical instrumentation and automation. Before IGP, John spent twelve years at The Edgewater Funds, a Chicago-based middle market private equity firm, where he focused on buy and build strategies in the filtration, flow control, sensors and data center/communication infrastructure markets. During his career, John has made over 30 private equity investments.
John holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a bachelor's degree from the University of Southern California.
John lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two children. A dedicated youth baseball coach, he spends much of his free time on the diamond, skiing with his kids, and cycling the trails of Marin.
Tim Heston is a Founder and Managing Partner of Gatespan Capital Partners. With over 25 years of experience as a private equity investor and advisor, Tim has invested in dozens of middle market businesses across a wide range of industrial end markets and business models comprising more than $2BN in enterprise value, partnering with management teams, founders and entrepreneurs to drive transformational growth.
Prior to founding Gatespan, Tim was a Partner at Industrial Growth Partners (IGP), an industrial specialist private equity firm, leading investments in niche manufacturing and distribution businesses. Prior to IGP, Tim was a Partner at Bertram Capital, a growth-oriented middle market private equity firm in the San Francisco Bay Area where he led industrial investments spanning critical power equipment, material processing and converting, flow control and fluid handling, specialty materials and building products. Tim began his investing career with Calera Capital, a middle market private equity firm in San Francisco.
Tim received his MBA from the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley and a Bachelor of Science degree from Boston College.
Tim lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two children, and in his spare time can be found on the sideline coaching youth sports, sneaking in a round of golf, and going on adventures with his yellow lab.
Get in Touch
We are always interested in connecting with founders, business owners, and intermediaries who are exploring partnership opportunities in the industrial sector.
info@gatespancapital.com