Ellis Capital

Ellis Capital

Bert Ellis structures Ellis Capital as the permanent capital vehicle for his own deal flow, a model shaped by three decades of building and exiting operating businesses. The firm grew out of the founder's track record at Act III Broadcasting, which he sold to Abry Partners, and Ellis Communications, which he merged into Raycom Media. That liquidity, combined with his early stake in WebMD, created the balance sheet from which Ellis Capital now writes equity checks into growth-stage companies across Atlanta and the wider Southeast. Ellis Capital makes targeted growth-equity investments, favoring small and medium-sized firms with high earnings potential. The firm crosses multiple asset classes — direct private equity, opportunistic media assets, and select real estate — and has deployed capital into internet technology, financial services, and healthcare. Confirmed positions include Vivex Biologics, a regenerative-medicine company where Ellis is a founding board member, and Brightwell Payments, a fintech platform serving global workforces. The firm also holds a controlling interest in KDOC-TV Los Angeles, an independent broadcast station that gives Ellis Capital a regulated media revenue stream alongside its portfolio of private technology and services companies. Ellis Capital operates leanly from a single office suite in Midtown Atlanta, led by Ellis as Chairman and CEO alongside VP of Administration Debra Davis, who manages financial oversight and operational continuity across the portfolio. Ellis holds additional board seats at MAXEX, a digital mortgage exchange, and Semantic-AI, an intelligence-software firm. While the firm does not disclose total AUM or deployment, Ellis has been an active executive producer on three feature films — "Act of Valor," "It Might Get Loud," and "The Hornet's Nest" — a pattern that signals a willingness to invest personal and firm capital into media projects that sit outside a pure venture-capital mandate. In May 2024, Ellis continued his governance push in public education by winning a seat on the University of Virginia's Board of Visitors, a role that can expand his network inside Virginia's research-commercialization corridors. What differentiates Ellis Capital from a standard growth-equity fund is its single-balance-sheet structure: Ellis does not raise blind-pool funds or report to outside limited partners in a traditional 10-year fund cycle. Instead, the firm deploys the founder's own liquidity on a deal-by-deal basis, which allows it to hold positions indefinitely and take operational roles — including board chairmanships — inside its portfolio companies without the pressure of a fund-level exit clock. That governance-heavy, permanent-capital posture mirrors the way a single-family office would manage proprietary assets, even though the firm describes itself as a venture-capital and opportunistic investment firm with outside strategic partners.