Private Equity-Backed Startup Buys Long Beach Welding Gas Supplier

Encore Gas & Supply, founded in 2014, is the first acquisition for Falcon Gases, now majority-owned by Odyssey Investment Partners.

Ben Anderson had spent 30 years in the gas and welding trade when he and owner Kelly Park opened a Long Beach welding-supply business in 2014. Back then it sold almost entirely to welding and construction customers.

Twelve years later that business, Encore Gas & Supply, is the first company bought by Falcon Gases, which was formed in late 2025 to buy up regional gas distributors. The Los Angeles Business Journal reported the deal Wednesday. Falcon first announced it Sept. 22 in a news release, which also said Odyssey Investment Partners, a private equity firm, had taken a majority stake in Falcon. Neither side disclosed a price.

Falcon now owns the Signal Hill plant where Encore fills cylinders of industrial and specialty gas, plus the showrooms where customers walk in, in Valencia, Ontario and Long Beach, the Business Journal reported. Private Equity Professional, a trade publication, called it a cylinder gas business with its own fill plant. That makes it a base for buying more.

If you've never thought about where welding gas comes from, here's how it works. Encore sells argon that keeps air off a fresh weld, acetylene for cutting torches and calibration gases that labs use to test their instruments. Its buyers run from motorsports teams to health care providers, with aerospace plants and food and drink producers in between, Private Equity Professional reported.

For those customers, the stated plan is that little changes. According to the trade publication, Falcon's strategy is to keep the distributors it buys under their own names and local managers while it supplies money and back-office help. The release still lists Anderson as Encore's president.

The company also changed course once before. It was founded as Encore Welding Supply, opened the Signal Hill gas plant in 2018 and took its current name in 2020, the Business Journal reported. That year it also began installing microbulk systems, which are small tanks set up at a customer's site and refilled by truck. In 2020, Anderson said the business had once served "almost exclusively" welding and construction customers, according to the Business Journal.

The industry has been through this kind of buying before. At the top of the U.S. trade are giants like Airgas, which has about 1,400 locations and has belonged to France's Air Liquide since 2016, Private Equity Professional reported. Under those giants sits a scattered field of regional sellers, many of them family businesses, and private equity firms have been consolidating it.

One of those buyers, Meritus Gas Partners, has gathered more than 25 distributors since late 2020. That includes one in Tempe, Ariz., bought in September, according to the trade publication. Falcon's chief executive, Pete Jeffe, previously ran StratosFuel, a Southern California renewable hydrogen developer. In the release, he said he wants Falcon to become a "large-scale independent packaged gas distribution platform."

Anderson's version of the plan, also from the release, is shorter: "invest in customers, people, and assets, and the rest will take care of itself."

Source: labusinessjournal.com, retrieved October 22, 2026. Other sources: financialcontent.com, peprofessional.com.