Third South Capital is a permanent holding company that acquires, builds, and operates profitable businesses.
We focus our time and efforts primarily on two parts of our business:
1. Holdings: Building the businesses in our portfolio, all of which are wholly owned. We have no exit timeline and aim to build durable businesses that can be owned and operated for generations.
2. Services: Deploying AI, building custom software, and providing technical advisory services for fellow operators.
Who We Are
We're four partners who, separately, got obsessed with the same idea: owning and running a portfolio of small businesses.
- Harrison Roday — business operations, finance, and deal execution experience.
- Colin Burns — public markets and capital allocation. Long/short public equity investing across US software and technology at global hedge funds.
- Justin Duke — software engineering and SaaS. Engineer and engineering leader at scale; founded and runs a SaaS product used by thousands.
- Myles Marino — Early-stage operations; leads M&A and portfolio operations.
Services
Taking the same approach we take internally with our own businesses, we deploy AI and build custom software for operators outside our portfolio. It typically starts with a workshop: we map your operation, identify what's worth pursuing, and develop a menu of potential projects. If we move to implementation, the deliverable is a working set of tools operated by your team.
Holdings
Current Portfolio
- Blue Canary Software, a suite of several Zendesk applications used by thousands of agents
- Icon Horse, the easiest way for developers to retrieve icons for a given URL
- Clipboard History Pro, a browser plugin for managing your clipboard history
- EntryThingy, a leading gallery and call management software for arts organizations
- Shopping Cart Apps, a Shopify app for syncing e-commerce tools with advertisers
Acquisition Criteria
We are a permanent holding company. While we have a wide-ranging mandate, to date, we have focused our efforts on vertical and niche SaaS. Specific elements we look for include 70%+ recurring revenue, teams under 10, and 5+ years of operating history. We don't buy pre-revenue or unprofitable growth businesses, businesses with high single-customer concentration, platform-dependent software, or businesses that only work because the founder is still in it.
Where We're at Our Best
- Founder exits. Growing businesses that a founder or founding team took from 0 to 1, but are now ready to exit.
- Complex situations. Wrong capital structure, technical challenges, corporate divestiture, etc. We're comfortable with complexity.
- Customer-driven development. Building or scaling businesses from the ground up with a target customer or problem in mind.
Get in Touch
Think you might be a fit for our services or have a business we should consider acquiring? Please reach out — we aim to move quickly.
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