A Rancho Cucamonga firm founded in 1962 has become a 65-office national platform — buying its way there, and drifting its address to Las Vegas
Certerra, a testing, inspection, and certification firm founded in Rancho Cucamonga in 1962 as RMA, closed its latest acquisition on June 4, buying a South Florida building-envelope specialist called Paramount Consulting & Engineering. It was at least the twentieth deal the company has done since 2021. The firm now runs more than 65 offices and laboratories with over 1,800 engineers, technicians, and scientists, and it is owned by the New York private-equity firm OceanSound Partners.
The pattern is worth an IE operator's attention because it runs against type. The Inland Empire is usually the place national capital buys into — warehouses, industrial land, logistics operators. Here, a company rooted in Rancho Cucamonga is the acquirer, using private-equity backing to consolidate a fragmented national industry from a Western base. Testing and inspection — the geotechnical work, materials testing, and special inspections that certify whether a road, bridge, hospital, or water system is built to code — is a business of thousands of small regional firms. Certerra is rolling them up.
The deals trace the strategy. In the past year the company has expanded into Texas through a pavement-engineering team, into the Carolinas through a Mid-Atlantic geotechnical firm, into Nevada through a Reno inspection company, and now into South Florida. Its stated end markets are transportation, power, healthcare, and water — the infrastructure categories drawing sustained public and private capital. A roll-up of this kind is a bet that scale wins in a sector where clients increasingly want one national firm that can certify work across state lines.
There is a wrinkle that operators here should register. When the company rebranded from RMA to Certerra in March 2025, the announcement carried a Las Vegas dateline, and its acquisition releases now run under a Las Vegas corporate identity. Its founding office and a core of its operation remain in Rancho Cucamonga — PitchBook still lists the company there, and the IE address still anchors its locations — but the corporate center of gravity has begun to drift out of state as the platform scales. It is a familiar arc for a private-equity-built company: the operating roots stay put, the headquarters identity follows the capital.
For the IE, the takeaway is twofold. The region grows companies capable of becoming national consolidators, not just sites that national consolidators acquire — a point the warehouse-centric story of the corridor tends to miss. And when those companies get built into private-equity platforms, the address on the press release is one of the first things to leave, even when the jobs and the founding operation stay. Whether Rancho Cucamonga keeps the operational weight as Certerra grows is the question worth watching.