As we settle into 2026 and continue to look to the exciting opportunities we are working on, we have been keen to reflect on 2025. Despite the obvious market challenges, we have had an extremely busy period, investing in four new platforms, developing our team and creating value across the portfolio.
Throughout the year we saw lots of businesses seeking supportive investors able to help both owners and management teams manage succession challenges while continuing to invest in growth.
Our flexible, entrepreneurial approach, and the fact we are investing our own funds, has enabled us to deliver solutions for vendors in a complex macroeconomic and political environment.
The four investments we completed were:
Train’d Up (June 2025) – the UK’s largest provider of rail apprenticeships and a fast-growing engineering apprenticeships provider, based in Scotland. Our investment was crafted around shareholder objectives to exit the business and retire whilst backing the incumbent management team and its vision for the next phase of growth.
Burgess Farms (October 2025) – one of the UK’s longest-established growers, processors and packers of carrots, parsnips and potatoes. We have backed the incumbent CEO and his team, enabling the founding family to retire from the business. Continued investment in the sites at Burgess, plus add-on acquisitions will form a key part of our growth plan.
Kerr’s Tyres (December 2025) – a 27-site tyre and automotive service centre business based in Northern Ireland. We have backed founder, Norman Kerr, and a growing management team to continue its impressive journey while delivering an accelerated consolidation of the UK market. Alongside the initial investment we have committed further funds to support our acquisition strategy.
Charis (December 2025) – Charis is a provider of distribution and administration services for financial support, products, and services targeted at vulnerable households and community projects (across private, public and not-for-profit clients). Chiltern provided a solution that enabled the founder and family shareholders to retire whilst backing the incumbent and incoming team to continue growing the business in an important sector.
Team Chiltern
Our team has continued to grow and develop with the well deserved promotions of Mike Coupland to Partner and Harry Reid to Manager, as well as the recruitment of Will Entwistle, who joins our investment resource to support with platform investments and portfolio value creation.
Alongside the team’s professional development, four members of the team (>20% of the team!) got engaged, two got married and one welcomed a new baby into their family! How they found time to do all this while completing four new investments remains a mystery and credit to all their hard work.
Looking forward to 2026
We believe that the UK remains an exciting market to invest in due to its abundance of entrepreneurial, founder/management-owned businesses.
Investing across the UK, we look forward to spending more time with our valued regional advisers, who remain key partners in sourcing opportunities.
We are targeting to complete more platform investments across our broad B2B end markets, while accelerating portfolio value creation through active buy and build programmes across our portfolio.
We look forward to working with many of you throughout the year and please do contact us if you have opportunities that could be of interest to Chiltern!
David Butler Partner