What Ama Capital's first deal tells us about the current state of the private equity market
The importance of a certain class of business exec who gets the PE growth mindset
Hello Rainmakers,
Sometimes we go inside a deal and look at the shifting sands of a sector, other times we poke around the funding world and try to get a sense of the sweet spots for different types of investors. Today we’re doing both, with a deep dive into what Ama Capital’s first ever deal to back Vella Group represents.
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A proven playbook in a consolidating niche
Ed Ransome cut his teeth in the hard school of special situations – learning the craft of private equity from Garry Wilson and Warwick Ley at Endless. It’s an experience he still talks about with clear respect: a place where you “roll your sleeves up”, see complex deals up close, and absorb what high‑calibre operators actually do, not just what investment memos say they do.
Now, with his own business Ama Capital, Ransome is applying that apprenticeship to a very different kind of platform – one that starts with operators first, capital second – and its first deal, the investment into Vella Group alongside Keyhaven Capital Partners, is a neat expression of that philosophy.
Vella is a network of around 18 accident repair centres stretching from Penrith all the way down the M6 to Peterborough, trading under the Vella Group name. It’s a sizeable business – around £60m of turnover with headroom for further growth even before adding more sites – and well‑regarded in what is now the core of the UK accident repair market: insurer‑driven, B2B volume.
Much has changed in the auto repair market, Ed Ransome explains, insurers and accident management companies have increasingly sought a new route to manage claims through trusted repair partners; for them, quality, turnaround time and customer experience matter as much as price.
Ransome says Vella has long sat in that sweet spot, helped by the reputation of founder Karl Vella, who even holds an MBE for his apprenticeship programme.
If the story feels familiar, that’s the point. Keyhaven previously backed Steer Group, the UK’s first major consolidator in this space, before selling it to Oakley Capital in 2024. Their decision to back Vella – and to do this deal exclusively with Ama – is a strong external validation that this is a second‑time‑round version of a winning thesis: professionalising and scaling a fragmented market where scale increasingly matters to insurers.
