Hirschen Capital exists to find, acquire, and operate a single outstanding small or mid-sized business in Germany’s industrial heartland. We are raising €1 million in search capital — twenty units at €50,000 each — to fund a disciplined search targeting companies in the MEITAC sectors (manufacturing, engineering, industrial technology, automation, and components) with EBITDA between €1.5 million and €5 million.
The thesis is straightforward. Germany’s Mittelstand is experiencing a once-in-a-generation succession crisis. Hundreds of thousands of profitable, well-run businesses need new ownership over the next decade, and the pipeline of qualified buyers is thin. Private equity is too large. Strategic acquirers are too slow. The founders’ children have moved on. We intend to step into that gap.
My co-founder Hiram Powers-Heaven and I bring complementary backgrounds: mine in corporate operations and technology, his in family business legal structuring and international tax. We both speak German. We both understand the cultural weight of what it means to take over a business someone built with their hands.
The search fund model has a thirty-year track record in the United States and has been successfully exported to Spain, Latin America, and parts of Asia. In Germany, it remains almost unknown. This is not because it does not work — it is because the cultural translation has not yet been done well. We intend to do it well.
Alongside the core search, Hirschen Capital is incubating two venture concepts — AARTVARK, an art-backed lending platform, and GreenSweep, a compliance-tech play — but the search remains the main event. Updates on all three will appear here as they develop.
The stag on our crest is not charging. It is watchful. That is rather the point.