Four Years Strong: Celebrating Tercera’s Anniversary and a Look Back

Today marks Tercera’s fourth anniversary.

The last four years have been quite a ride for this team of former operators and investors who started Tercera with a premise that services companies need love too.

In 2021, we saw a gap in the market for an investment firm that could provide not just capital, but the experienced counsel and quality connections that early and mid-size IT services firms could use to more gracefully navigate the plateaus of growth.

When we first got started, the environment looked a little different. The pandemic was still raging, with the vast majority of employees still working from home. Demand for SaaS platforms and digital transformation services were off the charts. Growth capital was cheap and talent was the biggest barrier to growth. DEI was front and center for employers, and ChatGPT was still 11 months away from being released as a “research preview”.

Fast forward to 2025. Employees are being pushed back in the office. Large digital transformation projects are fewer and harder won. Customer demand is now the biggest barrier for growth, and the days of services firms bleeding cash to win market share are gone. Profitability is the new black. As power shifts to new players, leaders are (unfortunately) dropping DEI like a hot potato. AI is pervasive, and ChatGPT is now used by more than 250 million people per week.

It’s pretty telling to look back on our 2022 predictions and compare those with our 2025 predictions.

Change has always been a constant in services and investing, but the pace of change in the last four years has been dizzying. Difficult at times, but also rewarding and exciting.

Milestones in the Journey

In the last four years…

  • The Tercera team has met nearly 700 firms, making connections and offering guidance while getting a bird’s eye view for how IT services are evolving in the age of AI.
  • We’ve invested in 7 companies that play in today’s hottest market segments – from data and AI, to identity and composable commerce, to digital, IT and finance transformation.
  • These firms consistently earn Partner of the Year accolades from software partners like Snowflake, Okta, Atlassian and OneStream, and have won numerous Best Places to Work awards.
  • We’ve completed 6 acquisitions across these investments, expanding their reach into new geographies, new sectors and building on the value they offer to customers.
  • We’ve curated a global network of 100+ services-centric advisors, and 30 formal Tercera Advisors who meet quarterly and provide regular counsel to Tercera and our portfolio.
  • We’ve held more than a dozen cross-portfolio best practice sharing sessions, including an in-person 2 day go-to-market event with sales and marketing leaders from across our portfolio, and our annual Tercera Leadership Retreat that happens each November.
  • We’re three years into the Tercera 30, which tracks the top software ecosystems for services partners, and has become a resource for hundreds of entrepreneurs and investors.

This year, we helped two of our early portfolio companies join forces to capitalize on the surging demand for data and AI expertise. Salesforce and financial services specialist, Zennify, acquired Terazo, a data and digital engineering specialist. Together, they are creating the #1 data and customer experience consultancy for regulated industries.

Lessons Learned Along the Way

With a core value to Pursue Growth (both personally and professionally), we’d be remiss to not highlight a few lessons learned from our own experiences and the hundreds of firms we’ve met along the way.

Choose your partners wisely. Every relationship and business will have its ups and down. Work with people and partners who you respect, who respect you, and who make you better. Work with advisors who you want alongside you to celebrate the good times, but more importantly to navigate the hard times. Because there will inevitably be hard times, and that’s where great companies and partnerships are built.

Investing should be a team sport. Tercera’s biggest superpower is the unique skillsets and perspectives we bring to the table from across our team and our wider set of Advisors. It’s in the boards we help to assemble, the introductions and advice from our broader network, and the connections we can facilitate across our portfolio. No one person has the right answer 100% of the time.

The power of focus, the value of options. Companies that try to be all things to all people don’t succeed in this environment, which is why we’ve always gravitated to pure play services partners. However, shifting market dynamics, evolving customer needs and new tech architectures have shown us the power of having options. You still need to pick a horse (or two) and have a clear opinion, but the risks of being single threaded are real.

The Road Ahead

Looking forward, we are excited to build on these learnings and milestones – expanding our network of advisors, deepening our insights into emerging ecosystems and technologies, and creating even more value for existing and new investments.

If you’re interested in following our journey and what we learn along the way, please subscribe to our monthly newsletter or follow us on LinkedIn.

If you’re interested in potentially partnering with us for an investment, please shoot us a note here!

Categories: Blog, News

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