For almost 30 years, a small team in Lower Manhattan has quietly built and sold the unglamorous infrastructure of American communications and media - and made a business out of the boring.
Walk down Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan and you will pass the offices of a firm that has, for nearly three decades, owned pieces of the internet you use, the towers your phone connects to, and the billboards you drive past without a second thought. Seaport Capital does not chase headlines. It chases cash flow. Founded in 1997 by William K. Luby and James J. Collis, the firm has spent the years since assembling one of the more coherent - and quietly successful - portfolios in the lower middle-market.
The pitch has barely changed. Seaport invests in three sectors: communications infrastructure and services, business and information services, and media. It writes equity checks of roughly $10 to $40 million into companies generating $3 to $15 million of EBITDA, takes a control position and a board seat, and holds for three to seven years before selling to a strategic acquirer, an infrastructure fund, or a larger private equity buyer. In an industry that reinvents its story every cycle, Seaport has been repeating the same sentence since the Clinton administration.
That consistency is the point. Six funds in, the firm has invested in roughly 40 companies without straying from its lanes, and its screen for a deal is almost boringly specific: recurring revenue, strong EBITDA growth, and operating leverage - the margin a business gains as it adds customers without adding much cost. If a company checks those boxes and has a founder who wants a partner rather than an exit, it is the kind of thing Seaport has bought before and will likely buy again.
Strip away the sector labels and Seaport is a control-oriented buyout firm with a taste for the unglamorous. Its portfolio companies rarely make consumer headlines because most of them sell to other businesses, municipalities, or carriers. Consider the range
CyberlinkASP runs outsourced IT for mid-market companies. MTN Satellite Communications delivers connectivity to ships at sea. Municipal Communications builds and operates cellular towers across the Southeast, Northeast, and Upper Midwest. Pearl Media sells street-level billboard and storefront advertising. Healthcare Linen Services Group launders hospital linens. Keg Logistics leases beer kegs to craft breweries. And Family Entertainment Live puts on Hot Wheels Monster Trucks Live and the Magic of Lights holiday drive-throughs. It is a strange list until you notice the common thread: recurring revenue, physical or contractual moats, and a founder who wants a partner rather than a buyer.
"We remain focused on identifying unique investment opportunities in the lower middle-market and partnering with management teams to build companies that have lasting legacies."
Bob Tamashunas, PartnerSeaport has two sets of customers, and they sit on opposite sides of the balance sheet. On one side are the institutional limited partners who commit capital to Seaport's funds - the pensions, endowments, and family offices that funded the $240 million sixth fund. On the other are the founders and management teams of the companies Seaport buys. The firm's entire reputation rests on being the kind of buyer the second group actually wants: a "collaborative institutional partner," in its own words, that brings industry relationships and operational help rather than a change of locks.
The end customers, one level down, are about as far from Silicon Valley as American business gets: hospitals renting clean linens, craft breweries tracking kegs, physician practices running billing software, municipalities logging emergency calls, cruise lines buying bandwidth mid-ocean, and advertisers renting a billboard on a busy corner. None of it trends. All of it recurs. That is the quiet logic of the whole portfolio - when the customer is an institution with an ongoing need, revenue shows up next month whether or not the market is paying attention.
Approximate sector mix across Seaport's ~40 investments. Figures are indicative.
Founder-led infrastructure and services companies hit a wall. They have proven the model in one market and want to expand into the next, or roll up a fragmented industry, or hand the founder some liquidity without selling outright. Banks are cautious about businesses this size, and the big buyout funds consider them too small to bother with. That gap - too big for a loan, too small for the mega-funds - is exactly where Seaport lives. It supplies growth capital, M&A support, and a board that has seen the same movie in dozens of similar companies.
The clearest example is i3 Broadband. Under Seaport's ownership, i3 grew into one of the leading fiber-to-the-home operators in Illinois, delivering gigabit internet, video, and voice across central Illinois markets. In 2020, Seaport and co-owner Countrywide Broadband sold it to Wren House Infrastructure, a Kuwait-backed infrastructure investor - a textbook lower-middle-market-to-infrastructure-fund handoff.
"We look forward to building and growing the current and future Fund VI portfolio companies with their management teams."
Scott McCormack, PartnerPlenty of firms say they are founder-friendly. Seaport's differentiator is continuity. Its five core partners - Scott McCormack, Bob Tamashunas, Drew Meyers, Bill Luby, and Jim Collis - have worked together since 2003 and cite more than 100 years of combined investing experience. That tenure matters in a market where relationships close deals. A founder selling a cell-tower business wants to know the people across the table have financed cell-tower businesses before and will still be there when the plan needs adjusting. Seaport's sector focus is narrow on purpose; the firm has stayed in the same three lanes across six funds while much of private equity drifted toward whatever was hot.
There is also a cultural point buried in that tenure. Private equity has a reputation for the quick flip and the cost-cut, and plenty of firms earn it. Seaport frames itself the other way - as a patient partner that supplies capital, industry relationships, and operational resources, then lets management run the business. The word the firm keeps using is "legacy," and while that language is easy to write on a website, the portfolio backs it up: businesses like Peak 10 and i3 Broadband were grown into category leaders over years, not dressed up over months. For a founder who built something and is not quite ready to walk away, that distinction is the whole decision.
Seaport's "product" is capital with a plan attached. In practice that means control buyouts, growth equity, and recapitalizations, plus the operational and M&A support that comes with a board seat. The firm typically requires board representation and holds three to seven years. Its most recent move, in April 2025, was a growth equity investment in FMC GlobalSat, a Starlink Authorized Reseller and wireless connectivity provider - a signal that Seaport's decades-long connectivity thesis now runs through low-earth-orbit satellites as well as fiber and towers.
The pattern repeats across the firm's history. Seaport backed DSL providers when broadband was young, cable systems in places as far-flung as Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, independent local telephone carriers in Alabama and Louisiana, and carrier-neutral colocation before "the cloud" was a marketing term. Each was a bet that connectivity is infrastructure and infrastructure eventually gets consolidated. The technology underneath keeps changing - copper to fiber, on-premise to Azure, geostationary to Starlink - but the shape of the deal does not.
Seaport is a fund manager. It raises money from limited partners, deploys it into control positions, grows EBITDA through operational improvement and bolt-on acquisitions, and realizes returns through management fees and carried interest on exits. Its exit history reads like a directory of who eventually needs infrastructure: SBA Communications bought its towers, Equinix bought Switch & Data, Lamar Advertising bought its outdoor company, Vista Equity bought SirsiDynix. Seaport builds the regional leader; the strategics and infrastructure funds pay up for it.
In the broader market, Seaport sits at the small end of a crowded field of communications, media, and business-services investors - firms like ABRY Partners, Grain Management, and Novacap operate nearby. Its edge is not size or brand. It is a narrow focus, a stable team, and a willingness to own the parts of the economy that keep working whether or not anyone is paying attention.
There is a version of private equity that is loud, fast, and built for the pitch deck. Seaport Capital is the other version. It buys the pipes, the towers, and the billboards, grows them for a few years, and sells them to the people who cannot build them fast enough. Nearly 30 years in, the strategy still fits on one line.