CVC takes majority stake in Bamboo

CVC Capital Partners acquired a controlling interest in Bamboo from White Mountains Insurance Group on 5 December 2025, in a transaction agreed in October valuing the company at an enterprise value of $1–10bn, an EV/EBITDA multiple of 15x–25x on 2025 figures. White Mountains received net cash proceeds of approximately 840 million dollars and retained around 15% of the fully diluted equity, worth 250 million at the transaction price, while chief executive John Chu continued to lead the business. Founded in 2017 and based at Midvale in Utah, Bamboo underwrites and distributes homeowners insurance in California and Texas without carrying the risk itself. It selects the risks, prices the policies, handles the claims and manages the distribution, while insurance companies issue the policies on their own paper and reinsurers absorb the losses. Revenue reached $250–500M in 2025 with an adjusted EBITDA of $100–200M, a margin of [members only], against 179.8 million dollars and 58.8 million the previous year. Californian homeowners insurance had become difficult to write, several established carriers having withdrawn or restricted cover as wildfire losses rose and rate approvals lagged, which left households unable to obtain policies and created the opening the company occupied. Underwriting at the level of the individual address, using more than two hundred data inputs, allowed it to select risks within a market others had abandoned wholesale, and its loss ratios averaged 55% over five years against 86% for the ten largest Californian insurers. Capacity rather than capital constrains a business of this kind, since it writes only what its carriers and reinsurers will stand behind. Seven programme partners, sixty reinsurers and twenty-eight institutional investors supported it by mid-2026, alongside a catastrophe bond and a reinsurance sidecar capitalised with 100 and 400 million dollars of third-party funds. Managed premium grew to 765.7 million dollars in 2025 from 484 million the year before, and the company entered Texas in September 2025. CVC filed for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2026, at a price range of 18 to 20 dollars per share. Evercore acted as lead financial adviser and Piper Sandler as adviser to White Mountains and Bamboo, with Cravath, Swaine & Moore as legal counsel, while Willkie Farr & Gallagher advised management and Latham & Watkins advised CVC.

The acquisition of Bamboo is part of the growth strategy of CVC, which already has several external growth operations under its belt, notably Therakos in 2024.