The Kodiak Dispatch
April 2026 Edition
Welcome to the Kodiak Dispatch: a monthly newsletter for the acquisition entrepreneurship and independent sponsor community.
Read on below for updates on the latest happenings at Kodiak and spotlights on the business builders and ecosystem partners that make this space tick. For our inaugural edition, we’ll start by formally introducing ourselves.
Introducing Kodiak
We founded Kodiak around the insight that enduringly profitable small businesses have and will continue to form the backbone of the American economy. Over the next few decades, over $10 trillion worth of these businesses is set to change hands as more than 3 million owners retire, many of whom lack firm succession plans. At the same time, a new generation of talented, mission-driven operators are ready to carry these businesses forward. Underpinning all of this are rapid improvements in artificial intelligence that impact nearly every business process and end market in ways both known and unknown.
Kodiak exists at the intersection of these three forces. We invest alongside talented entrepreneurs who are acquiring and operating durable small businesses across sectors. We work with operators to acquire businesses, build world class teams, and execute on value creation plans. We strive to equip our portfolio companies with the full breadth of our in-house AI resources, network, and proprietary tooling – developed over decades of cumulative technology-oriented investing and operating amongst our founding team.
Our mission is straightforward: find great people, help them acquire great businesses, and give them the capital, resources, and network to succeed.
What We’ve Built So Far
Since inception, we’ve completed 15 investments comprising over $250M in total enterprise value. Our investments span healthcare, route-based services, industrials, and tech-enabled services. We invest from a committed capital base and have the flexibility to move quickly when the right opportunity meets the right person.
Alongside our investing efforts, we are assembling a team dedicated to serving our portfolio companies and advancing purpose-built technology enablement – starting with Kodiak itself. We have designed tooling to improve our efficiency as an investment firm, allowing us to spend more of our time building relationships with our operators and helping them succeed.
How We’re Different
We care deeply about aligning ourselves with our operators over the long term and are thoughtful around our teams having meaningful ownership and incentives to grow with us. Beyond capital, we are committed to being a pillar of the entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA) and independent sponsor community and we are investing deeply in supporting our operators as value creation partners over the lifetime of an investment. We are building AI-enabled tooling, recruiting support, back-office infrastructure, digital marketing services, and a peer network of operators who can learn from one other. We also believe deeply in small business ownership and that the durable enterprises built by generations of founders deserve to be thoughtfully transitioned to operators that will keep them locally owned and managed.
Our founding team is a mix of entrepreneurs and investors with decades of experience scaling businesses and thoughtfully utilizing technology to maximize operating efficiency and delight customers.
Our Vision
Our goal is to build the preeminent talent ecosystem for acquisition entrepreneurship in America. We want Kodiak to be the first call for ambitious operators seeking a long-term partner for independent ownership. This newsletter is a way for us to stay connected with the broader community of operators, lenders, and ecosystem partners who make this space work.
We’re excited to share more about what we’re seeing, who we’re working with, and where we think this space is headed. Welcome to the Kodiak Dispatch.
Learn more about Kodiak and the ETA landscape:
• A Silver Tsunami: The Coming Wave of Small Business Succession: Kodiak partners Joe Lonsdale and Denis Aven on the societal trends underpinning the firm’s mandate
• Community Spotlight: Kodiak Holdings: EBIT Community featured Kodiak in a March 2026 spotlight
• The New Route to Entrepreneurship: Taking Over a Profitable SME: Kodiak partner Khaled Abu-Suud spoke with Entrepreneur about his journey to Kodiak and what he looks for in investment opportunities
Kodiak Operator Spotlight
Leyla Sudbury | BSU Electronics
An engineer-turned-consultant-turned-operator who ran a manufacturing-focused search and found a 35-year-old printed circuit board (PCB) assembler in Austin with exceptional talent and deep customer loyalty.
The Operator
An industrial engineer by trade, Leyla Sudbury worked at Jaguar Land Rover before moving into strategy consulting at BCG where she advised companies on operations, growth and integrations. Her experiences on the shop floor and observations around pain points for manufacturers eventually led her to pursuing a self-funded search with the explicit goal of acquiring a business in this space.
Leyla spent her early search visiting factories, building relationships with experienced operators and investors, and developing conviction around where and how to enter the market. She partnered with Executive Chairman Andrew Cousin, who raised one of the earliest search funds and was the first searcher to ever acquire and operate a manufacturing company. Collectively, Leyla and Andrew have over five decades of manufacturing leadership experience.
The Business
BSU Electronics is a printed circuit board (PCB) assembly contract manufacturer and engineering services provider based in Austin, Texas. Founded in 1989, the company has deep roots in the American tech economy (dating back to contributing circuit boards for Xerox’s first digital copier) and has built a diversified customer base spanning startups to Fortune 500 companies across aerospace, medical devices, industrial applications, and entertainment.
What Got Us Excited
PCBs are embedded in virtually every electronic device in modern life, and BSU occupies an attractive niche: domestic customers who require strict security assurance, deep engineering partnership, and rapid turnaround times consistently choose U.S.-based assemblers like BSU over offshore alternatives. The domestic market for PCBs is large and fragmented, with ~65% of the $10B in annual spend estimated to be comprised by lower mid-market competitors. Coupled with multiple growth tailwinds (IP controls, tariffs, regulations protecting or mandating domestic products), the PCB market provides an attractive setup for a buy and build strategy led by a strong operator.
Within the compelling market setup, BSU stood out as an ideal target due to the quality of its people and the stickiness of its customer relationships. Most clients have worked with BSU for over a decade, drawn by the company’s ability to solve technical challenges and repeatedly deliver complex assemblies to spec and on time. These inputs contributed to a compelling financial profile at entry: BSU’s 4-year revenue CAGR and EBITDA margin were both double the industry norms for growth and profitability.
The Transaction
Leyla acquired BSU from its longtime founder, who was looking for a successor that would protect the team he had built while bringing the ability to scale the business into its next chapter. Leyla stepped into the CEO role with a clear mandate: preserve BSU’s culture of engineering excellence while expanding the company’s customer base, deepening service to existing clients, and investing in new technology to give BSU’s team more leverage as they grow.
How Kodiak Helped
Kodiak provided equity capital and partnered closely with Leyla through diligence and close. Beyond capital, Kodiak helped Leyla validate the market opportunity through multiple potential customer introductions and network checks. Kodiak is excited to work closely with Leyla and the BSU team to drive technology enablement and inorganic growth moving forward.
Ecosystem Spotlight
Eli Albrecht | Albrecht Law
A Big Law M&A veteran who built a boutique M&A firm purpose-built for the Independent Sponsor and Family Office ecosystem.
Background
Before launching his own firm, Eli practiced M&A at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher where he worked on private equity platform and add-on acquisitions, SPAC and public company acquisitions, and strategic mergers, acquisitions, and corporate matters. Eli holds a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center and a B.S. in business with high honors from Johns Hopkins University. He’s been featured in Bloomberg Law, the Wall Street Journal, and Eli publishes regular M&A content in his weekly “M&A Mondays” newsletter on Substack. Eli has become a go-to resource for operators and sponsors navigating the deal lifecycle - especially those looking for more white glove and sophisticated representation.
Albrecht Law: Built for the ETA Ecosystem
Albrecht Law is a full-service M&A law firm with a focus on independent sponsors, searchers, family offices, and small private equity groups. The firm’s partners have closed hundreds of transactions representing tens of billions in deal volume, bringing Big Law sophistication to deals of all sizes.
Eli and the Albrecht Law team specialize in complex deals and those that need creative solutions for challenges. They have also developed techniques for dealing with unsophisticated seller’s counsels. Albrecht Law begins working with Sponsors during the search phase, then, works on the LOI and finally, on diligence, definitive documents, investor structure, and debt process, when the deal commences. Albrecht Law’s tax group participates in the deal from Day 1 and ensures tax optimization through QSBS and other Holdco structuring.
Beyond M&A, the firm offers transactional tax expertise (including QSBS planning), fractional general counsel services for ongoing corporate governance and employment matters, and a litigation practice that handles high-stakes post-M&A disputes, business partnership conflicts, and employment litigation.
Albrecht Law offers contingent-fixed-fee arrangements where most of the fee is paid at closing contingent on the deal closing (like an investment banker).
The ETA ecosystem runs on trust, and having the right legal counsel can make or break a deal. Dozens of clients are already singing Albrecht Law’s praises. Eli has built a practice that understands the dynamics of search-backed and independent sponsor transactions (capital constraints, speed requirements, closing surprises). His close-aligned model and willingness to share knowledge publicly have made him a valued resource and leader in the community. We’re proud to count Eli as part of the Kodiak ecosystem.
Get in touch: albrecht.law | Subscribe to M&A Mondays: elialbrecht.substack.com
Disclaimer: This newsletter is provided for informational and background purposes only and is intended to describe the professional experience, leadership approach, and general investment philosophy of Kodiak Holdings Capital Management, LP. It does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities or investment advisory services. The views expressed are general in nature and should not be relied upon as investment advice. Investment strategies and processes involve risk and do not guarantee future results.