Platform File: Apex Service Partners

Almost every national residential-services platform of the last two years has a moment you can point to: the sale, the recap, the change of control. Apex Service Partners has a different shape. It is the largest of them all, and instead of one moment it has a rhythm, a continuation fund, a minority investment, a steady beat of acquisitions, that never quite resolves into an exit. Placed next to a verified count of the licenses Apex actually holds on the ground, that rhythm is the most useful way to read the biggest platform in the trades in 2026.

Apex is one of the defining names of the great trades roll-up, and it is the largest single platform the wave has produced. That size means the brand list has been written up in a dozen places, so a useful file cannot just repeat it. It has to say what the public record does not: where the ownership actually sits after three rounds of capital, and what the platform holds on the ground once the common-name collisions are stripped out. Here is both.

Who owns Apex, and the money behind it

Apex has moved through a clear sequence of capital since it was launched. Alpine Investors, a San Francisco private equity firm known for its people-first approach, created the platform in July 2019 with a commitment to invest at least 100 million dollars building it into a national leader, anchoring it on two founding Florida businesses, Best Home Services and Frank Gay Services. In October 2023, Alpine closed a 3.4 billion dollar single-asset continuation fund dedicated entirely to Apex, one of the largest single-business continuation transactions in private equity history, with commitments from Blackstone Strategic Partners, HarbourVest Partners, Lexington Partners, and Pantheon alongside 450 million dollars from Alpine’s Fund IX. In May 2026, funds managed by Apollo agreed to acquire a strategic minority interest in Apex, with Alpine remaining the lead owner and adding to its own investment; that transaction was announced as a definitive agreement expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026. Through all three rounds, control has stayed with Alpine and the founding management team.

The people matter as much as the capital here, because Apex’s whole thesis is that management, not financial engineering, drives the returns. The platform is run by co-CEOs AJ Brown and Will Matson. Brown came in through Alpine’s CEO-in-Residence program and was previously Chief Financial Officer of Avitru, an earlier Alpine portfolio company; Matson was hired through Alpine’s CEO-in-Training program. Apex reports that about 65 percent of its senior leaders come from military backgrounds and was named a Top Veteran-Friendly Employer in 2025. One lineage note worth making, because it is a frequent point of confusion: Alpine has said openly that it applied to Apex the same build-up strategy it used earlier in what became the Wrench Group, an Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix HVAC and plumbing platform that Alpine, with Skylight Capital and management, built and sold to Investcorp in 2016, and that Investcorp in turn sold to Leonard Green and Partners in 2019. Apex and Wrench Group share that lineage of strategy, but they are separate companies with separate owners today.

The brands under the platform

By its own 2026 profile, Apex operates in 46 states with more than 150 locations, over 13,000 employees, and more than 3 billion dollars in annual revenue, and reports having served more than 16 million homes. It describes its portfolio as 75 prominent local brands; third-party trackers put the full count higher once smaller, unannounced tuck-in acquisitions are included, because Apex does not publish a complete brand list. The model is buy-and-own: unlike partnership structures that leave sellers holding equity, Apex takes majority control and folds each company into shared services, while the local brand keeps its name and leadership. The Echelon Database tracks 14 of those named brands with resolved state records, and they group by region and era.

The 2019 founding cohort is in the Southeast: Best Home Services in Naples and Frank Gay Services in Orlando, the two Florida businesses Apex was built around, joined that September by Southern Air Heating and Cooling, headquartered in Ball, Louisiana, and operating across Louisiana and Mississippi under the founding Preuett family.

The Western brands came next: Right Now Heating and Air Conditioning in Boise, Idaho in 2021, then Owyhee Heating and Air Conditioning in the Boise market and BelRed Energy Solutions in the Seattle area of Washington in 2022. The same year brought Dilling Heating and Cooling in Charlotte, North Carolina into the Carolinas.

The 2024 expansion was the widest. Apex acquired Frontier Service Partners, itself a small platform, which brought Haley Mechanical in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Korte Does It All in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and AB May in Kansas City. Apex also added HomeBreeze, a technology-forward water-heater and home-services specialist in Southern California, and Hero Home Services in the Minneapolis market, which trades under storefronts including Hero Plumbing and Uptown Plumbing. In December 2025 it acquired We Care Plumbing, Heating and Air in Murrieta, California. Alongside these named deals sit the balance of Apex’s portfolio, dozens of smaller tuck-in acquisitions that are folded in without a separate announcement, which is why a public brand list always trails the real portfolio and why Apex’s own count of about 75 prominent brands understates the full number.

What Apex holds on the ground

Here is the part no aggregator publishes. A brand list is easy to copy. What is hard, and what actually shows where a platform is dug in, is a count of the licenses each brand holds in each state. The Echelon Database produces it by cross-referencing a maintained Apex brand-ownership map against active state contractor license rosters, then stripping out the common-name collisions where an unrelated local company happens to share a brand’s name. Apex operates in 46 states; Echelon tracks a subset of them under continuous weekly refresh, and the states do not all license the same way, which changes what a fair count looks like. Most of them license the contracting company as an entity, so there we count company licenses. Every row below is an exact-name match confirmed in the brand’s home state and is presented as a verified floor. The table covers the six brands Echelon can resolve today; the brands held pending and the markets not yet tracked are addressed in the notes that follow.

Brand	State	Active company licenses
Frank Gay Services	Florida	9
Best Home Services	Florida	4
Right Now Heating & Air Conditioning	Idaho	1
BelRed Energy Solutions	Washington	3
We Care Plumbing, Heating & Air	California	1
Hero Home Services	Minnesota	3
Total active company licenses, six brands across five states		21

Louisiana: a named presence, held conservatively

Southern Air Heating and Cooling anchors Apex’s 2019 entry into the Gulf, operating out of Ball, Louisiana across the Louisiana and Mississippi markets under its founding family. Louisiana does not separate its contractor licenses by trade and records presence at the parish level, so the fair entry here is a named presence rather than a company-license count. Southern Air is also a common style of name, so Echelon holds it to hand-verified matches before it is counted anywhere. For that reason it sits outside the company-license table above and is carried as a Louisiana presence, entered conservatively, until its records are pinned by hand.

California: a brand present, a license to watch

California is where the license layer earns its keep, because it separates a live operation from a dormant registration. We Care Plumbing, Heating and Air in Murrieta resolves cleanly to an active California company license. HomeBreeze is the more instructive case. It holds a California license in its own name, as Homebreeze Contracting Incorporated, but that license read as inactive at the most recent public check, so it does not appear in the active roster and Echelon records it as a present brand with a lapsed or dormant license rather than counting it. That is exactly the distinction a brand list cannot draw, and it is the kind of signal the license layer exists to catch.

The brands the map names but the footprint does not yet count

Two kinds of brand sit outside the count above, and both are named honestly rather than smoothed over. The first is brands in states Echelon does not yet cover under weekly refresh: Haley Mechanical in Michigan, AB May and Academy Air in the Kansas City area of Missouri, and Korte Does It All in Indiana, which licenses at the municipal level rather than through a single statewide roster. The second is brands in states Echelon does track but cannot yet confirm. Dilling Heating and Cooling in Charlotte falls in North Carolina, whose statewide roster Echelon is still ingesting, so its records are pending rather than absent. And in Idaho, Apex’s Owyhee Heating and Air Conditioning does not appear under that exact name in the active roster, while several unrelated Owyhee-region companies do, so Echelon holds Owyhee pending a hand match rather than counting a possible namesake. It is the same discipline the footprint table applies everywhere: the brand list shows reach, the license data shows verified presence, and where the two diverge we say so.

The platform that keeps moving

Read the ownership history as a clock and Apex looks nothing like a platform winding toward a single exit. In four years Alpine took it from two Florida companies to the largest residential-trades platform in the country, then in 2023 ran a 3.4 billion dollar continuation fund that handed its earliest investors liquidity while rolling the asset forward, then in 2026 agreed to sell a strategic minority stake to Apollo in a deal expected to close in the fourth quarter, and all the while kept buying, with a California acquisition closing as recently as December 2025. Trade press, citing a person familiar with the terms, reported the Apollo deal valued Apex near 10 billion dollars, with Apollo investing roughly 2 billion for a stake above 20 percent; the parties did not disclose terms, so we carry those as reported figures. That is the profile of a sponsor engineering periodic liquidity around an asset it intends to hold and compound for a long time, not one preparing to sell.

For the reader sizing up their own market, the more useful read is what all that capital is for. Apex is the most acquisitive consolidator in the residential trades, and its Boise position shows how dense the competition for operators has become: it is one of three national platforms active in that single metro, alongside The SEER Group and, through its Ultimate brand, Redwood. When a platform this well-funded is still adding brands across 46 states, the question for a strong independent operator is not whether a consolidator is coming to your market, but which one, and on what terms. We present the pattern as analysis rather than forecast, and we note the counterweight: Apex is not a seller on the public record, and its behavior is that of a live buyer, not a platform in run-off.

That is the double vision this file is built to give you. The analyst reading the cap table sees three rounds of capital and no change of control, a platform being funded to keep compounding. The operator reading the trucks sees brands still being bought and still hiring, in Boise, in Murrieta, across the Southeast. Both are true at once, and the reader who holds both pictures is the one who is not surprised when Apex shows up in the next market on its list.

Frequently asked questions

Who owns Apex Service Partners in 2026?

Apex is led by Alpine Investors, which launched the platform in 2019 and remains the lead owner. A 3.4 billion dollar continuation fund Alpine closed in October 2023 brought in secondary investors including Blackstone Strategic Partners, HarbourVest, Lexington, and Pantheon, and in May 2026 funds managed by Apollo agreed to a strategic minority investment expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, with Alpine adding to its own stake. The company is run by co-CEOs AJ Brown and Will Matson.

How large is Apex Service Partners?

By its own 2026 profile, Apex operates in 46 states with more than 150 locations, over 13,000 employees, and more than 3 billion dollars in annual revenue, and reports serving more than 16 million homes, which makes it the largest residential HVAC, plumbing, and electrical roll-up in the United States. Apex describes its portfolio as 75 prominent local brands and publishes no complete list; Echelon tracks 14 named brands with resolved license records.

What brands does Apex Service Partners own?

Apex keeps each company operating under its own name. Brands Echelon tracks include Frank Gay Services and Best Home Services in Florida, Southern Air Heating and Cooling in Louisiana and Mississippi, Right Now Heating and Air and Owyhee Heating and Air in Idaho, BelRed Energy Solutions in Washington, Dilling Heating and Cooling in North Carolina, HomeBreeze and We Care Plumbing, Heating and Air in California, Hero Home Services in Minnesota, and Haley Mechanical, Korte Does It All, and AB May, which came in through the 2024 acquisition of Frontier Service Partners. Apex describes its portfolio as about 75 prominent local brands and publishes no complete list; most of the rest are smaller tuck-ins that are never separately announced.

How many contractor licenses does Apex Service Partners hold?

Across the states Echelon tracks under weekly refresh where an Apex brand operates, Apex brands hold 21 active company contractor licenses, led by Florida and spread across Washington, Minnesota, Idaho, and California. Louisiana is recorded as a named presence because it does not separate licenses by trade. The North Carolina brand sits in a roster Echelon is still ingesting, and several Apex brands sit in states Echelon does not yet track, so those are named but not yet license-resolved. The figures are exact-name verified and presented as a floor.

Is Apex Service Partners the same company as Wrench Group?

No. They are separate companies with separate owners. They are related only in lineage: Alpine Investors, with Skylight Capital and management, built the platform that became Wrench Group and sold it to Investcorp in 2016, and has said it applied the same strategy to Apex. Today Wrench Group is majority-owned by Leonard Green and Partners, while Apex is led by Alpine Investors, with Apollo having agreed to a minority stake in 2026.

Is Apex Service Partners for sale?

There is no announced sale process. On our read, Apex is doing the opposite of sitting still: it closed a 3.4 billion dollar continuation fund in 2023, agreed to a strategic minority investment from Apollo in 2026, and was still acquiring into late 2025. That pattern reads as Alpine engineering periodic liquidity while holding the platform for a long further run, rather than preparing a near-term full exit. We present that as analysis, not prediction.

Methodology and sources. The corporate snapshot is drawn from Apex Service Partners’ own 2026 profile and from investor announcements by Alpine Investors and Apollo. The ownership timeline is assembled from those sponsor and company announcements and from M&A trade press. The license footprint is produced by the Echelon Database, which cross-references a maintained platform-ownership map against active state license rosters in the states Echelon currently tracks. Where a state licenses the contracting company as an entity, Echelon counts company licenses; where a state licenses without trade separation, as in Louisiana, Echelon reports a named presence. Common-name collisions are removed through home-state and exact-name verification, and brand names prone to collision are held to hand-verified matches before counting. Figures reflect current active license records and are presented as a verified floor, not a ceiling. Apex brands in states Echelon does not yet track are named but not license-resolved. The platform-phase read is labeled analysis, not prediction. Echelon takes no position on the merits of any transaction or policy referenced, and provides public-records intelligence, not accounting, legal, or investment advice.

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