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Keep what makes your business yours
We invest because we value what you have built. Brand, reputation, expertise, customer relationships and culture are assets to protect, not problems to standardise.
Certra Capital
Building Europe's specialist testing laboratory group.
We partner with independent, founder-led laboratories serving medical-device, pharmaceutical and regulated life-sciences customers. Certra provides long-term capital, acquisition capability and practical operating support, while preserving the identity, expertise and customer relationships that made each business successful.
Our instinct is to preserve, not to absorb.
What partnership with Certra means
A home for specialist laboratories.
Selling a business does not have to mean disappearing into a larger organisation.
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Stay involved, or plan your succession
Some founders want to keep leading their business. Others want to step back over time. We structure the partnership around what is right for the business and its shareholders.
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Gain resources to grow
Certra can support investment in people, systems, commercial capability and new services where they strengthen the business.
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Build beyond what is possible alone
Where it makes strategic sense, we can provide capital and execution for complementary acquisitions, so the business can broaden its capabilities and reach.
Investors and operators
We understand businesses from the inside.
Our background spans healthcare, regulated services, scientific businesses and institutional investing. We understand that a laboratory's value sits in its people, reputation, methods, customer trust and quality, not simply its equipment and revenue.
That operating perspective shapes how we work with management teams: as partners, not as a remote owner imposing a playbook.
What we look for
The laboratories we look for.
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Specialist testing capability
Independent laboratories serving pharmaceutical, medical-device or regulated life-sciences customers.
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Technical credibility
Strong scientific teams, recognised quality systems and relevant accreditation or regulatory credentials.
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Founder-led or independently owned
Businesses where an owner is considering succession, growth capital, or the benefits of joining a larger specialist group.
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A strong business underneath
Good customer relationships, sound economics and a reputation worth preserving.
We are particularly interested in businesses where complementary capabilities can create more value together than apart.
How we help businesses grow
Scale where scale matters.
We work alongside management teams to identify what would genuinely make the business stronger. That may mean capital for growth, recruiting capability that is missing, supporting commercial development, or providing the resources to pursue complementary acquisitions. We do not centralise decisions simply because we can.
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Capital to grow
Funding for people, systems, new services or capacity, so growth is not limited by what the business can finance on its own.
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People where it is missing
Where a capability is absent, we help recruit for it, commercial, finance or senior operators, rather than expecting the team to stretch to cover it.
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Support when useful
Finance, technology, talent and commercial expertise where these genuinely help. Day-to-day decisions remain close to the people who understand the customers and the market.
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Complementary acquisitions
Where it makes strategic sense, we provide capital and execution for further acquisitions, so the business can broaden its capabilities and reach beyond what it could alone.
Investment philosophy
Scarcity is built, not found.
We invest in fragmented specialist markets where strong businesses exist, but scaled specialist platforms remain rare. Our approach is to preserve what already makes a business valuable, then professionalise selectively where greater scale creates a real advantage.
Bringing complementary businesses together can create a position that is difficult for others to assemble and difficult for customers to replace. That is where durable value sits, and we build with a long-term operating mindset.
Better businesses, not simply bigger ones.
Certra combines investment discipline with an operator's view of what can be built after an acquisition. We welcome discreet conversations with business owners, advisers, lenders and investment partners where there may be a fit.
Contact CertraAbout
Operators before investors.
Certra combines investment and operating experience across healthcare and specialist regulated markets. That background shapes how we behave as an owner. We know what a founder is handing over when they sell, and we treat it that way.
Philosophy
Value that is difficult to assemble tends to last.
In fragmented specialist markets, scale alone is rarely the advantage. The more interesting opportunity is to combine expertise, customer relationships and capabilities so that the whole becomes more useful than the individual parts.
We invest where we believe that combination can create something scarce: a position that is difficult for others to assemble and difficult for customers to replace. That takes time, judgement and restraint.
How we think
We do not separate the decision to buy from the work of building.
Having built and run businesses ourselves, much of it in healthcare and specialist services, we know that what happens after the deal matters more than the deal, and how much a regulated, quality-driven business depends on its people and its reputation. Before we acquire, we ask what can practically be done afterwards. Where organic growth is real. Where professionalisation helps and where it would only add weight. Where support removes a constraint. Where a further acquisition would make the whole more capable. We would rather understand a business deeply and move once than move often and understand little.
How we work
Our instinct is to preserve, not to absorb.
Our starting point is to preserve a business's name, team and the things that made it worth buying. We support from behind rather than direct from above, and we do not buy businesses in order to cut them back. Value in specialist markets comes from reputation and capability, and both are easy to damage and slow to rebuild.
We invest with patience. Value of this kind compounds slowly and then quickly, so we make decisions on the timescale a business needs rather than a reporting calendar, and give the people running it room to plan in years rather than quarters.
Founder
Founded by Sofia Senhaji Rhazi.
Sofia brings more than fifteen years across institutional investing, capital markets, healthcare operating roles and entrepreneurship. Her experience includes leading investment strategies at BlackRock, structuring over one billion euros of transactions at Deutsche Bank, and founding and selling a healthcare business, alongside hands-on work with regulated healthcare companies. She has also repositioned a contract research organisation, a business that sits directly alongside specialist testing and the markets Certra is building in.
If this is the kind of owner you have been looking for.
We welcome conversations with owners, advisers and capital partners, in confidence and without obligation.
Contact CertraContact
We welcome a direct conversation.
If you are a business owner considering your options, an adviser with a situation to discuss, or a capital partner who shares our view of specialist markets, we would be glad to hear from you.
Enquiries[email protected]
OfficeLondon, United Kingdom