Ben Cao

Ben Cao is an engineer-turned-investor. He earned a BS in Computer Engineering from Iowa State University, where he was named Outstanding Graduating Senior, and later completed his MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He began his career on the technical side, spending 5+ years at IBM as an engineer, product manager, cloud-solutions client manager, and "Master Inventor," where he filed roughly 150–200 patents (100+ granted) across cloud computing, mobile user interfaces, streaming analytics, security and compliance, and mobile wireless networking, and helped scale a 15-person emerging-solutions team into a 300+ person organization. He also spent a summer at Google as a product manager working on next-generation cloud computing, and worked as a product/engineering leader at Rokt.

In 2017 he joined Seacoast Capital Partners, a lower-middle-market private equity firm (offices in Boston/Danvers, MA and San Francisco, CA) that provides non-control growth capital — debt and equity alongside management teams rather than buying companies outright. Over 6+ years on the deal team he served as an investor and, notably, as interim CEO of a tech-enabled portfolio company and as an advisor to various Seacoast portfolio companies — an unusually operational role for an investment associate.

More recently, Cao was Head of VC and PE at Symphony, where he built partnerships with top investment firms and worked with operating partners on digital value-creation strategies for their portfolio companies. In 2024 he founded MileBreaker Partners, a private investment fund (SEC Form D filed 2024) based in the New York / Jersey City area, with the stated mission of acquiring and elevating a single great small or medium U.S. business, focused on the healthcare sector — an entrepreneurship-through-acquisition ("search fund") model. His stated motivation traces to his father, an engineering leader who ran the largest circular particle accelerator in China.

• Buyout / control acquisition of one healthcare SMB at MileBreaker: "on a mission to acquire and elevate a single great small or medium business in the U.S., with a focus on the healthcare sector" — a hands-on ownership model, not a spray-and-pray venture portfolio.
• Non-control growth capital at Seacoast: check sizes of $5–$30M, structured as subordinated debt, preferred equity, and/or common equity with 5–7 year maturities, "less dilutive and less invasive than traditional private equity sponsors."
• Financial gate at Seacoast: revenue > $10M, EBITDA > $2M, pro-forma leverage ≤ 4.0x, and ability to service a blended current yield ≥ 8%.
• Partners with management to grow, not exit — Seacoast backs teams "looking to grow, not exit their business," using capital for organic expansion, acquisitions, recapitalizations, and shareholder buyouts.
• Operator's lens: his IBM/Google/Rokt product-and-engineering background and interim-CEO experience mean he evaluates deals on operational and technology value-creation potential, not just financials.