Dealflow | April 27, 2017

The Builders Fund takes minority stake in tea company Traditional Medicinals

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The Builders Fund has taken minority stake in Traditional Medicinals.

The investment is the first by a non-friends and family investor in Traditional Medicinals’s 40-year history. It is the third investment by Builders Fund, a New York growth-stage private equity fund.

Builders, which focuses on North American impact investing, counts Gratitude Railroad as a founding investor and is managed by Tripp Baird, Mike Dutton and Eric Jacobsen. The fund has $30 million in commitments and expects to close later this year.

Builders sees ”an enormous opportunity within small-cap buyout and growth stage private equity investing,” Baird says. Traditional Medicinals, based in Sebastopol, Calif., was among the first wave of organic food brands and has “been thinking systemically about environmental, social and governance factors (ESG), and shared value creation long before those terms were even coined,” Baird says.

The investment will support the company’s growth and provide liquidity to employee shareholders. Big Path Capital helped arrange the financing.

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