Bertram Capital Invests in Percopo Coatings Platform

The finished coating is the part everyone sees. The harder product is coordination: getting painting, waterproofing, flooring, fireproofing, surface preparation, restoration, crews, materials, access, safety, and one operating schedule to behave like a single job.

Bertram Capital's investment in Percopo Coatings Company, announced October 6, 2026, is a bet on that coordination layer. Terms were not disclosed. The Longwood, Florida contractor becomes the fifth platform investment in Bertram Ignite I, with a plan to expand through acquisitions, partnerships, stronger operating systems, and support from Bertram's in-house technology team.

What Bertram Capital Invested In

Percopo Coatings Company was founded in 2003 by Mike and Victoria Percopo. Mike Percopo is the company's founder and CEO, while Florida corporate records identify Victoria Percopo as president. Over more than two decades, they built a specialty contractor serving commercial, industrial, and institutional properties across the Southeastern United States.

The service list explains the platform thesis. Percopo handles interior and exterior painting, specialty coatings, waterproofing, seamless flooring, sandblasting, restoration, fireproofing and intumescent coatings, themed finishes, and adjacent preparation and installation work. Its project record includes airports, resorts, schools, federal buildings, and other facilities where access, downtime, safety, and sequencing can matter as much as the material applied to a surface.

Bertram did not disclose the investment amount, valuation, ownership percentage, control structure, leverage, or closing mechanics. The transaction should therefore be understood as an undisclosed private-equity platform investment, not a priced venture round. Bertram also credited Cook M&A, led by Arnis Kins, and Ashurst Perkins Coie, led by Blake Schell, for their work on the partnership.

Why Self-Performing Several Trades Matters

Percopo's operating proposition is simple to describe and difficult to execute. General contractors, developers, and facility owners can divide adjacent scopes among multiple specialists, but somebody still has to manage the gaps between them. A waterproofing delay can hold up finishes. Surface preparation can expose a problem that changes the coating plan. Work inside an active airport, school, hotel, or government facility adds another layer of access and schedule pressure.

Percopo says it reduces that burden by self-performing more trades under one organization. That gives the customer fewer contracts, fewer schedules, and fewer handoffs to reconcile. It also gives the contractor more responsibility: broad capability only creates value when estimating, crews, safety, materials, project management, and quality control remain aligned across every scope.

This is where the investment moves beyond paint. Bertram Capital is backing a company that already owns a larger portion of the job-site relationship, then asking that model to work across more locations and acquired businesses. The asset is the coordination system wrapped around the craft.

Bertram Ignite Turns Percopo Into a Platform

Percopo is the fifth platform investment in Bertram Ignite I. Bertram describes Ignite as a lower-middle-market strategy that can make control or non-control investments in business services, consumer, and industrial companies. The firm says it has raised more than $4B in capital commitments since 2006, while its managing-partner profile identifies Ignite I as a $260M fund. That $260M figure is the size of the investment vehicle, not the amount invested in Percopo.

The platform label matters because Percopo is already seeking acquisition and partnership opportunities that can extend its geographic footprint and bring additional operators into the business. This creates a familiar private-equity playbook with an unusually physical execution test. The platform can centralize systems, purchasing, marketing, analytics, and back-office work, but the customer still experiences the company through a crew, a schedule, a prepared surface, and a finished facility.

Bertram Vice President Zachary "Zack" Bassi framed the opportunity around the industry knowledge, relationships, entrepreneurial discipline, and grit required to operate trade-services businesses. That emphasis is useful. Fragmented markets may look attractive on a spreadsheet, but local trust and field performance are not interchangeable line items.

Where Bertram Labs Fits

Bertram plans to support Percopo with Bertram Labs, its in-house technology team. The group works across digital marketing, data and analytics, application development, e-commerce, and platform optimization for Bertram portfolio companies. In Percopo's case, the relevant opportunity is not turning a coatings contractor into a software company. It is making a physical-services business easier to find, measure, operate, and expand.

Digital systems can improve lead generation, estimating visibility, project reporting, recruiting, customer communication, and integration across acquired businesses. They can also give management a clearer view of which locations, services, crews, and customer segments are performing. Those advantages remain dependent on execution in the field, where technology cannot substitute for preparation, safety, material knowledge, or the judgment required inside an occupied facility.

The useful question is whether technology can remove friction without removing local responsibility. If Bertram Labs gives branch leaders better information and shared infrastructure while crews retain the authority to solve job-site problems, the combination can strengthen the customer experience. If systems become another layer between the operator and the work, scale will create the kind of handoff Percopo was built to eliminate.

What the Partnership Changes

For Mike and Victoria Percopo, the transaction adds institutional resources after 23 years of founder-led growth. It creates more capacity to pursue acquisitions, enter adjacent markets, recruit talent, and invest in operating infrastructure without building every capability from scratch. It also changes the management challenge from running one strong contractor to integrating a network of operators around a common standard.

For Bertram, Percopo extends a trade-services portfolio that has included roofing, restoration, and other field-service platforms. The firm's experience with buy-and-build strategies and technology enablement gives it a repeatable set of tools. Percopo supplies the specific operating base: deep coatings knowledge, several self-performed trades, customer relationships across demanding end markets, and founders who have spent two decades learning where projects break.

The transaction offers no disclosed amount to use as a shortcut for significance. Its meaning sits in the work Bertram and Percopo have chosen to combine. Acquisitions can expand geography quickly, but each new operator will bring its own crews, habits, systems, customer promises, and local reputation.

The Coordination Business Gets Larger

Private equity has spent years assembling fragmented service markets because local operators often possess valuable relationships and execution knowledge that have not yet been organized into regional platforms. Specialty contracting fits that logic, but it punishes abstraction. A roll-up is only as good as the next estimate, mobilization, safety meeting, occupied-space plan, and finished surface.

Percopo enters this partnership with a clear customer proposition: own more of the handoffs so the customer manages fewer of them. Bertram is adding capital, acquisition capacity, operating resources, and technology to carry that proposition across a wider footprint. The expansion will become visible one acquired team and one completed project at a time, wherever the platform's systems meet the local judgment that earned the relationship in the first place.