Built by operators. Run for the long term.
LeapHL Equity is a private equity firm that invests in founder-led and management-led companies across North America's lower middle market. We combine patient capital with the technology and operating depth of the LeapHL group.
Our story
From transforming companies to owning them.
LeapHL began as a technology and transformation partner to complex organizations: redesigning workflows, implementing enterprise systems, securing data and putting AI to work in production. Along the way, a pattern emerged. The businesses that gained the most were not the largest. They were founder-built companies with loyal customers, strong reputations and years of underinvestment in systems, data and process.
LeapHL Equity was created to act on that insight. We invest directly in those businesses and bring the full LeapHL platform alongside our capital. Where a traditional sponsor hires consultants, we deploy our own team. Where a typical hundred-day plan produces a slide deck, ours produces working systems.
The result is a firm that thinks like an owner, executes like an operator and measures itself on the durability of what it builds.
Private equity has spent forty years perfecting how to buy a company. We are more interested in how to build one.
What we believe
Five principles that govern every decision.
Alignment
Founders, management and our investors sit on the same side of the table. We structure every transaction so that everyone wins from the same outcome: a stronger business.
Integrity
We say what we will do, and we do it. The terms we propose in the first meeting are the terms we close on, and the commitments we make to employees outlast the deal.
Rigour
Conviction comes from work. We diligence deeply, model conservatively and hold ourselves to the same reporting standards we ask of our companies.
Humility
The people who built the business know it better than we do. Our job is to add what is missing, remove what is in the way and stay out of what already works.
Endurance
We build companies designed to thrive under any owner, in any cycle. Short-term gains that weaken the long-term franchise are not gains at all.
Responsible ownership
Good governance is good business.
We hold every portfolio company to a standard of governance, security and stewardship appropriate to a much larger enterprise, because that is what we intend it to become.
- Independent boardsEvery platform company gains an independent director with relevant operating experience early in our ownership.
- Cybersecurity and data privacyBaseline security assessment in the first hundred days, with remediation funded from day one.
- People and communityWe invest in the workforce: training, safety, retention and a path to ownership for key employees.
- Transparent reportingInstitutional-grade quarterly reporting for our limited partners, with consistent valuation policies.
Part of the LeapHL family. LeapHL Equity operates independently, with its own investment committee and governance, and draws on LeapHL's technology, AI, data, cybersecurity, ERP and managed-services practices under an arm's-length services agreement that benefits our portfolio companies and our investors.
Visit LeapHLToronto
Headquarters
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
New York
New York, NY
United States
LeapHL Delivery
Technology and transformation teams
Across North America
Meet the people