Disclaimer: Unless noted otherwise, views and analysis expressed here are the author's own and based on public sources. The article is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. This is not financial advice. Please consult a professional for investment decisions.

*********************

A Sudden Cardiac Arrest is no joke. 

Your chances of surviving one outside of hospital are 1 in 10 - increasing to 7 in 10 if CPR is administered promptly, followed by a shock from an Automated External Defibrillator (AED) within 3 minutes. In fact, Sudden Cardiac Arrests cause 20% of all deaths in Europe.  

This is the elevator pitch of Safe Life, the world’s largest distributor of AEDs - and one of the quirkier rollups we've covered in this newsletter. Safe Life was founded in 2019 by the Swedish Independent Sponsor duo Jimmy Eriksson and Alex Albedj. 

For years, installation verticals like HVAC, plumbing and Photovoltaic have been SWARMING with Private Equity activity (check out our primers on HomeServe and 1komma5). Humble AED wholesalers, not so much. After all, the addressable market for public access AEDs is a) minuscule - measuring <$2B globally, and b) incredibly fragmented. 

Surely if there was money to be made, savvy PE-owned fire safety rollups like Presto in Sweden and API Group in the US would have figured it out a long time ago?  

Turns out, no they didn't.  

Safe Life began with a $3M revenue “platform” in Sweden. 6 years and almost 50 acquisitions later, it’s grossing $300M+ with a 10% EBITA margin. A €500M (c.$580M) EV transaction with the Private Equity firm Bridgepoint in 2025 unlocked a 58% IRR for Safe Life’s early investor Byggmästaren and an estimated SEK 760M ($80M) windfall for Eros Capital, Alex and Jimmy’s aptly named investment vehicle. 

This is one the craziest Independent Sponsor stories to come out of Europe.   

Read on to learn:

This article is sponsored by PPH Financial Group: your Fractional CFO par excellence. Month-end closings. Lender reporting. PPAs. Audits. Dashboards. Automation. PPH Financial can do it all - and then some. Across Europe and in the US. Get in touch with Pavleta today: [email protected]!

Before the big break with AEDs, Alex and Jimmy had tried a lot of different things. 

Some projects took off and some didn’t. Their first cooperation was Carl & Son, a men’s skincare brand. Despite heavy marketing and the "organic premium" angle, Carl & Son exhibited challenging unit economics and was put in voluntary bankruptcy (subsequently the CEO and her husband bought out the business and today its products are widely available). 

Not that it mattered to Alex and Jimmy, two individuals with boundless creativity. A trawl through Swedish media archives reveals a fascinating (and random eclectic) mix of projects launched between 2017 and 2021:

EG7’s story is so vertiginous that it deserves a spinoff article, but in short:

It started as Toadman Interactive in 2013, acting as an outsourced partner to game developers. In 2016, Alex left United Bankers, a Nordic M&A boutique to build a proto merchant bank. As Alex put it to me: “Jimmy and I scrambled all our savings to invest a few million SEK [low 6 figure USD] per situation. We’d take 10-25% stakes in companies in interesting, highly selected markets, and help them with their M&A journey and strategy”.

Toadman was one such example. As the Chairman of the Board in 2017, Alex took Toadman public. The idea was to turn a tiny ($1M revenue) gaming consulting business into an Embracer-style gaming rollup:

Rollups from Hell Vol.4. Embracer: keeping game face on after 160+ acquisitions, a three-way split, and a 90%+ share price drop

The market lapped up the pitch, valuing Toadman a touch below SEK 200M ($20M). Not bad! EG7 duly delivered. Between 2017 and 2022, it grew sales 200x, to SEK 2B+. Over time, Alex’s involvement diminished due to a combination of conflicting commitments (primarily Safe Life), successive equity issuances and his stock sales. 

As Alex stepped back, problems began to pile up. According to Swedish media, “an acquisition journey came to a halt in 2021 and ended with the company's founders and early key personnel losing control of the company”. Amidst recriminations and operational setbacks, EG7 share price collapsed and redundancies followed. The legacy Toadman business was shuttered in 2025. 

Worry not for EG7’s destiny! After a 3-year hiatus, Alex returned as Chairman: buying stock and tabling value-enhancing proposals.   

But let’s go back to Safe Life’s early days. While at United Bankers, a chance assignment selling a Swedish office coffee supplier prompted Alex to look for businesses with similarly sticky characteristics. As he put it when we met in Stockholm, “What goes in an office that cannot be removed?”. Alex and Jimmy started researching industries that fit that framework, sometimes a dozen a week. 

It didn't take long for Jimmy to suggest AEDs, which he had firsthand experience with from  his time as a Personal Trainer at an upscale Stockholm gym. A member's life was saved when an AED mounted on the wall was used after he went into cardiac arrest. Jimmy found the supplier that sold and maintained the device. Jimmy persuaded Alex to go all-in on this opportunity, buying 100% of the supplier and not 25%.   

Want to know how we stumbled upon the idea for this article? 

By researching Byggmästare Anders J Ahlström Holding AB - aka Byggmästaren, a listed Swedish investment vehicle and Safe Life’s early backer. What began as a construction business in the 1890s has over time transformed into a "situation-driven" investment company. The catalyst for the reinvention was the SEK 800M+ profit on a residential property development in an outlying suburb of Stockholm. The money was promptly put to use, with investments in programmatic acquirers (Safe Life and Green Landscaping Group - which we covered here), as well as venture-style bets (Volta Trucks, Azelio, DP Patterning).  

Byggmästaren’s recollection of meeting Alex and Jimmy is this: “In early 2020, an intermediary presented us with an opportunity to invest... During 2019 [Alex and Jimmy] had identified an opportunity to consolidate the market for the distribution of primary automated external defibrillators (AEDs) and related CPR training. We met with the entrepreneurs and studied their plans, which resulted in us offering to take on the entire funding round”. 

To say that Jimmy and Alex had merely “identified” the opportunity is a major understatement. 

During 2019, they put up the initial $1M+ equity investment, sourced the acquisition debt, and closed the first 2 deals: HLR Konsulten ($3M revenue) and Nordic Servicia Medical ($2M revenue).  

Byggmästaren invested SEK 63M ($7M) over two rounds, in return for a 52% stake.  

That’s right: Jimmy and Alex gave up half the company for a measly $7M. Of course, they could've held out for a better deal… with the risk that someone else went ahead and built a $600M rollup! 

We don't know who else was on Alex and Jimmy’s outreach list, or why these people declined. We can only speculate that the market size must have been a major red flag. A 2022 internal estimate put the addressable market at a mere $1.4B globally (source):  

Indeed, achieving scale took some time. After the first two deals in 2019, 5 more followed in 2020. Run-rate revenues grew from $5M to $12M. By Christmas 2020, Safe Life was officially a multinational, operating in Sweden and Finland. 

But hang on: What’s the point of rolling up defibrillator distributors anyway?