The Firm That Bets on the Toolmakers, Not the Cure

There is an old line about the California gold rush: the people who reliably got rich were not the miners panning the rivers, but the merchants who sold them picks, shovels and blue jeans. Ampersand Capital Partners has spent nearly four decades applying that idea to medicine. It does not try to guess which experimental drug will work. It buys the companies that every drug developer, no matter which molecule wins, has to pay.

Founded in Boston in 1988 by Richard A. Charpie and investing in life sciences since the early 1990s, Ampersand is a middle-market private equity firm with roughly $3 billion under management. Its territory is deliberately unglamorous: laboratory products, laboratory services, contract manufacturing, pharma services and specialty products. Together these make up what the firm calls the mission-critical tools and services behind breakthrough medicines and medical devices - the suppliers, not the stars.

That discipline paid off publicly on May 28, 2026, when Ampersand announced it had closed a new fund, Ampersand 2026 (or AMP-26), at its $1.5 billion hard cap. The fund was oversubscribed and closed in a single close less than five months after launching - its twelfth primary fund since 1992. For a firm working in the quiet middle of the industry, it was a loud result.

01 / The ThesisOwning the general store

Most people picture life sciences investing as a bet on a cure - a single antibody, a gene therapy, a molecule that either passes its trials or does not. That is a high-variance game. Ampersand plays a different one. Its portfolio companies sell reagents, run assays, manufacture biologics, package drug product and supply the instruments that fill a modern lab. When any of their thousands of customers succeeds, the supplier gets paid. When a customer fails and pivots to a new program, the supplier still gets paid, because the new program needs the same tools.

This is the "picks and shovels" logic taken seriously, and it changes the risk profile of the whole strategy. Instead of concentrating on the binary outcome of one clinical trial, Ampersand spreads its exposure across the plumbing of an entire industry - one that keeps spending whether or not any particular experiment works.

The smartest move in biotech might be to stop investing in biotech - and start investing in what biotech buys.

02 / The PortfolioFive aisles of the supply chain

Ampersand organizes its work into five segments, and the companies inside them read like a directory of the industry's back office. In laboratory products it has backed makers of instruments and reagents. In laboratory services it has owned genomics, bioanalytical and diagnostics businesses. In contract manufacturing it builds CDMOs across biologics and cell and gene therapy. Pharma services covers outsourced CRO, formulation and clinical supply work, while specialty products rounds out the map with differentiated healthcare offerings.

The names inside those segments make the abstraction concrete. Ampersand's portfolio has spanned contract manufacturers such as Alcami and biologics specialist Avid Bioservices, medical device maker Confluent Medical Technologies, reagent and antibody producers including Biosynth and Leinco Technologies, instrument makers such as Magritek and Specac, and testing and diagnostics businesses like Resolian, Flagship Biosciences and Admera Health. None of them is a household name. All of them sell something a drug developer or a hospital lab cannot easily do without.

The point of the map is coverage. A drug does not travel from idea to pharmacy in one step; it passes through discovery reagents, analytical testing, process development, manufacturing and packaging. Ampersand has a foothold at nearly every stop, which means it can back a company, grow it through add-on acquisitions, and understand exactly where it sits in a customer's workflow. In early 2026, for example, portfolio CDMO Alcami expanded by acquiring the packaging specialist Tjoapack - the kind of bolt-on that widens a supplier's role in its customers' supply chains.

03 / The ExitsWhen the giants come shopping

The clearest evidence that the strategy works is who ends up buying Ampersand's companies. Again and again, the acquirers are the largest names in life sciences - the same giants whose customers rely on those very tools. The pattern is not subtle.

Company	What it did	Outcome
Brammer Bio	Gene therapy CDMO	→ Thermo Fisher (2019)
GENEWIZ	Genomics services	→ Brooks Automation (2018)
Nexcelom Bioscience	Cell analysis	→ PerkinElmer (2021)
Vibalogics	Viral vector CDMO	→ Recipharm (2022)
Bioventus	Orthobiologics	→ Public listing (Nasdaq: BVS)

Each of those companies was built into something a strategic acquirer decided it needed to own outright. That is the Ampersand exit playbook in a sentence: take a specialist supplier, scale it into a category leader, and let the industry's biggest platforms compete to buy it.

04 / The MethodFounder-friendly, on purpose

Private equity has a reputation, not always earned, for buying control, cutting costs and flipping. Ampersand markets itself as the opposite kind of partner. It takes both majority and minority positions, and it typically keeps founders and management teams in operating control rather than replacing them. It surrounds those teams with operating partners, executive advisors and executives-in-residence - people who have run these kinds of businesses before.

The approach has been noticed. Ampersand has been named a top founder-friendly investor for four consecutive years, and in 2025 it was recognized by GrowthCap as both a Top Private Equity Firm and a Top Growth Equity Firm. Rankings from HEC Paris-Dow Jones and Preqin have placed it among the better-performing growth and private equity managers globally.

There is a continuity to all of this that is rare in private equity. Richard Charpie founded the firm in 1988 and has anchored a strategy that many funds would have abandoned for something flashier. The team around him has grown into general partners, operating partners and executives-in-residence spread across Boston, Amsterdam and London, but the underlying promise has not drifted: capital that behaves like a builder, backing the people who already know how to run these businesses.

Take a specialist supplier, grow it into a category leader, and let the giants compete to buy it.

05 / The Business ModelHow the firm itself makes money

Ampersand is a fund manager. It raises capital from institutional limited partners - endowments, foundations, pension plans, insurers, funds of funds and family offices - and deploys it in tranches of roughly $10 million to $200 million per company. Its targets tend to have $10 to $200 million in revenue and positive EBITDA of $2 to $40 million: real businesses, not pre-revenue science projects. The firm earns management fees on its assets and carried interest on the gains when companies are sold or taken public.

That AMP-26 filled its $1.5 billion hard cap in a single close says something about how limited partners view the track record. When a fund is that oversubscribed that quickly, the fundraise is less a pitch than a waiting list.

06 / The MarketA quiet corner that keeps growing

Where does Ampersand sit? Squarely in the middle market of healthcare private equity, a lane it shares with firms such as Water Street Healthcare Partners, Altaris, GHO Capital and the life sciences arms of larger players, plus generalist funds that occasionally reach into lab services and contract manufacturing. What distinguishes Ampersand is specialization and endurance - it has run essentially one thesis across nearly four decades and 12 funds, through the mapping of the human genome, the rise of biologics, and now the cell and gene therapy era.

In practice Ampersand serves two sets of customers at once. On one side are the founders and management teams of its 80-plus portfolio companies, who get growth capital and operating help without losing their seat at the head of the table. On the other are the institutional investors who fund its vehicles - the endowments, pensions, insurers and family offices whose returns depend on Ampersand picking suppliers that giants will eventually want. The portfolio companies, in turn, serve pharma, biotech, diagnostics and medical device innovators around the world. It is customers all the way down.

The tailwind is structural. Drug developers keep outsourcing more of their manufacturing and testing, diagnostics keep getting more molecular, and every new therapeutic modality still needs someone to make the reagents and run the assays. Ampersand's whole business is being that someone - or owning the companies that are. From its base at One Post Office Square in Boston, with additional offices in Amsterdam and London, it works across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

In a gold rush, own the general store. In biotech, own the CDMO.

The name itself is a small tell. An ampersand - the symbol "&" - is the character that joins two things together. For a firm whose pitch is capital joined to founders, and founders joined to the industry they supply, it is a fitting piece of punctuation to build a company around.