We operate the business before we buy it.

How we work

Most companies we meet don't have a technology problem. They have a product that works, customers who stay, and an owner carrying sales, pricing, and operations at the same time. Growth is real but it isn't compounding, and nobody inside can say exactly why.

We take the business seat first — Chief Business Officer, President, CEO — and fix what's constraining growth. When both sides know it's right, we acquire.

That order matters. A buyer who arrives with a spreadsheet and a data room is guessing. We underwrite from inside the business, which means fewer strangers in your company and a faster answer. It also means you watch us work before you decide anything at all.

How we're built

I take the operating seat myself. Behind it is a bench of people I've built and shipped products with for years — manufacturing, supply chain, engineering, sales and finance — brought in for the specific problem and for as long as the problem lasts.

A consulting firm has to keep its people utilized, so it staffs to its own payroll. We staff to the business. You get the specialist you need for the quarter you need him, under one accountable relationship, and no one is billing you to stay busy.

What we look for

• Profitable B2B companies, $8M to $20M in revenue, $1M to $3M of EBITDA
• A business that still runs through the owner, on spreadsheets and institutional memory
• An owner thinking about succession, often without a family successor
• A durable position underneath the mess — recurring customers, spec-in, regulatory standing or geographic density
• Financeable with bank debt and family office capital

We are not looking for a company that has already been professionalized. We are looking for one that hasn't. Putting a management structure, real systems and written procedures into a business that has run on one person's judgment for thirty years is the work we do, and it is where the value is.

One or two engagements at a time. We diligence the technology and the financials ourselves. We buy to operate, not to flip, and we hold as long as we are the right owner.

Track record

TouchSensor Technologies

Revenue from $1M to $60M. Sold to Methode Electronics at 12× EBITDA.

UICO

Technical co-founder, later CEO. Patented the first industrial-grade capacitive touchscreen. ARR from near zero to $18M with Garmin, Kohler, Whirlpool and United Technologies. $15M raised.

Visionox North America

Sales flat at $1M for four years. Built qualified pipeline to $150M in under two years on a rebuilt product, pricing and channel.

Plenovo — Novinium

Simplified the product and repriced it to match how utilities actually buy. Multi-million dollar utility pilots and a business unit positioned for spin-off.

Six15 Technologies

Led the repositioning that took the platform to market. Three pilots converted to paying customers on measured productivity gains.

Who you'd be working with

Qntm Ventures is led by Bahar Wadia. Thirty years building the commercial side of hard B2B technology, six times over, as founder, CEO, President and Chief Business Officer.

I read engineering schematics, financial statements and deal documents with equal fluency. That's not a credential, it's the reason the method works — I can see that a product needs a software layer to sell, and underwrite what that layer does to the P&L, without a translator in between.

Electronics engineer by training, MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, several patents, and a first job at Bell Labs.

Code of honor

1. Lead from wherever you sit. Title is not permission. If you see it, own it.
2. If you lead people, teach them. Push hard and treat them well. Those are not in tension.
3. Challenge the idea, respect the person. Comfort creates blind spots. We would rather be corrected than agreeable.
4. Move with urgency. Speed and quality are both requirements, and neither excuses the other.
5. Check the work. Especially your own, and especially when you are the most experienced person in the room.
6. Be someone others can build a plan around. Reliability is the whole reputation.
7. Give the credit to whoever had the idea. There is always enough to go around.
8. Hire people who will be better than us. What we are building has to outlast the people who built it.
9. Ask for help early. Working alone on something hard is a choice, not a virtue.
10. Tell the owner the truth about his company, even when the truth costs us the deal. We would rather lose a transaction than earn one on a misunderstanding.
11. The people come with the business. When we buy a company we inherit everyone who built it, and every promise made to them.
12. We buy to operate, not to flip. We will hold as long as we are the right owner of a business, and we will say so plainly when that changes.

Adapted from a code of honor we first encountered through Valuetainment, with gratitude.