Lauren Hyde

Lauren Bates Hyde is a CFA charterholder who built her career in investment research and private-market investing in Birmingham, Alabama. She attended Samford University from 2009 to 2013. Early in her career she worked on the research team at Highland Associates, a Birmingham-based institutional investment consulting firm, where she served as an institutional investment consultant — conducting economic and financial-market research, maintaining capital-market assumptions, building model portfolios, and producing research reports and position papers.

She subsequently joined EBSCO Capital, the investment and acquisition team of EBSCO Industries, a family-owned, privately held conglomerate headquartered in Birmingham with 20+ operating businesses and roughly $2.5 billion in annual revenue. EBSCO Capital was founded in 2014 and functions as a family-office/permanent-capital investor, sourcing new platform companies for EBSCO and add-on acquisitions for its existing portfolio. As an Associate and later Senior Associate, Hyde focused on sourcing and evaluating new investment opportunities and supporting the transaction process.

More recently, Hyde transitioned into economic development: she became the first Executive Director of the Alabama Business Intelligence Center (AL Intel / ABIC) and serves as Executive Vice President at the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama (EDPA), where she applies an investment lens to public and private company analysis. Founders researching her should be aware that her EBSCO Capital contact details may be dated, as her current public role is with EDPA.

Her combined experience spans economic and financial-market research, private-market due diligence, investment modeling, client-facing advising, and fund operations — giving her fluency in both public and private company analysis.

• Invested through EBSCO Capital, whose stated mission is to be permanent capital for "durable and enduring businesses," partnering with strong management teams to create sustainable long-term value (not a quick-flip / seed model)
• Targets new platform companies with ~$8–25M in EBITDA plus add-on acquisitions for existing portfolio platforms
• Sector emphasis on professional/engineering services, distribution, industrial services, and niche manufacturing
• In her role, focused on sourcing and evaluating new opportunities and supporting deal execution — i.e., screening, diligence, and transaction support rather than writing individual angel checks
• Background as an institutional investment consultant (Highland Associates) means she evaluates opportunities with a research- and fundamentals-driven, capital-markets perspective