Most people who could name the buyer of Chelsea Football Club would struggle to name a single other thing Clearlake Capital Group owns. That is the whole paradox of the firm. Its most visible asset is a Premier League club watched by hundreds of millions of people. Its actual business is buying software vendors, industrial suppliers, and consumer brands that almost nobody thinks about - and rebuilding them from the inside. The football club is the billboard. The unglamorous companies are the business.
Founded in Santa Monica in 2006, Clearlake now manages roughly $90 billion across private equity, private credit, and special situations. It concentrates on three sectors - technology, industrials, and consumer - and it has a name for the thing it does after it writes a check. Not the deal. The work that comes next.
01 / What it doesA three-letter thesis
Clearlake's pitch to the management teams it backs fits on a business card: provide patient, long-term capital to businesses that can benefit from its operational improvement approach, which it trademarks as O.P.S. The letters stand for Operations, People, and Strategy. In practice that means Clearlake does not treat a purchase as finished at closing. It treats closing as day zero of a 100-day plan - new governance, tighter reporting, cash-flow and working-capital discipline, talent changes, and a sharpened strategy for where the company should compete.
This is the distinction the firm keeps drawing between itself and the caricature of private equity. The caricature buys cheap, loads on debt, cuts, and flips. Clearlake's version is slower and more operational: it would rather own the value it creates by making a company genuinely run better than extract it through leverage alone.
The firm seeks to partner with experienced management teams by providing patient, long-term capital to dynamic businesses that can benefit from Clearlake's operational improvement approach, O.P.S. - Clearlake Capital, on its own approach
02 / Where it came fromFrom distressed debt to $90 billion
The firm was started by Steven Chang, Behdad Eghbali, and José E. Feliciano. Eghbali came out of Morgan Stanley's technology banking group and then TPG Capital, where he worked on buyouts and turnarounds. Feliciano trained as an engineer at Princeton, took an MBA at Stanford, and did time at Goldman Sachs - and, in one of the more human footnotes in modern finance, served as CFO of the dot-com startup govWorks, the company documented in the film Startup.com, before it collapsed in 2000. Chang left in 2015; Eghbali and Feliciano have run Clearlake as co-founders and managing partners ever since.
The early firm was flexible by design, sliding between control buyouts and distressed securities depending on which the market was mispricing. That flexibility became a permanent feature. Clearlake still describes its hunting ground in terms most investors avoid saying out loud: out-of-favor industries, market dislocations, and companies in transition. The ugly-duckling deal is not the exception to the strategy. It is the strategy.
03 / Who it servesTwo sets of customers
Clearlake really has two customers, and they sit on opposite ends of the same transaction. On one side are the limited partners who supply the capital: public and corporate pension funds, endowments, foundations, insurers, sovereign wealth funds, and family offices. They hand Clearlake money and expect returns across a full market cycle. On the other side are the management teams of the 300-plus companies Clearlake has owned, who get not just capital but the O.P.S. operating machinery bolted onto their business.
In late 2025 the firm added a third door. Its roughly $1 billion acquisition of Pathway Capital Management was a deliberate move into the private-wealth channel - a way to raise money from wealthy individuals, not only large institutions. For a firm built on institutional capital, that is a notable widening of the funnel.
04 / What it sellsProducts, services, and one football club
Structurally, Clearlake runs three lines of business. The first is private equity - sector-focused buyouts, corporate divestitures, recapitalizations, and reorganizations, all run through the O.P.S. playbook. The second is special situations and opportunities, the distressed and complex-situation work that traces back to the firm's roots. The third, and fastest-growing, is Clearlake Credit.
Credit is where the recent story concentrates. In 2024 Clearlake agreed to buy MV Credit, a pan-European private-credit specialist, from Natixis Investment Managers. When that deal closed in May 2025, the firm folded its lending operations into a single platform called Clearlake Credit, spanning both liquid and illiquid strategies and underwriting individual investments up to $1 billion. By its own account the platform represents more than $57 billion of credit deployed globally, and Clearlake has set a target to triple its credit base by 2030.
Then there is the asset that does not fit any of those boxes. In May 2022, a consortium led by Todd Boehly and Clearlake completed the roughly $3 billion purchase of Chelsea Football Club, held through an ownership vehicle called BlueCo, with Clearlake as a co-controlling owner. It remains the firm's most public holding by a wide margin - a live, weekly, globally televised test of whether an operations-first investment philosophy survives contact with the Premier League.
The football club is the billboard. The unglamorous companies are the business.
05 / How it makes moneyThe business model, plainly
Like most alternative-asset managers, Clearlake makes money two ways. It charges management fees on the capital its investors commit, and it keeps carried interest - a share of the profits - when investments do well. The engine that drives both is fund-raising: the bigger and more consistent the funds, the larger the fee base and the more capital there is to deploy into deals. On that measure the firm keeps climbing. Its eighth flagship fund, Clearlake Capital Partners VIII, closed in June 2026 with $14.8 billion of commitments, explicitly positioned around backing AI-driven transformation inside its portfolio companies.
That AI framing is worth pausing on, because it is the opposite of most AI headlines. Clearlake is not building artificial intelligence. It is buying old-economy and enterprise-software businesses and using AI as one more operational lever - a way to make a data company or an industrial supplier run leaner. The bet is on applying the technology, not inventing it.
06 / The edgeWhy it is different
Plenty of firms say they add operational value. What separates Clearlake is the combination: a narrow sector focus that lets it build real expertise in software, industrials, and consumer; a single repeatable playbook in O.P.S. that travels from one deal to the next; and a willingness to buy in the parts of the market most investors flinch at. A distressed industrial supplier and a NASDAQ-listed software company do not look alike, but under Clearlake they get run through the same operating discipline.
Its list of take-privates makes the range concrete. The firm acquired Cornerstone OnDemand for roughly $5.2 billion in 2021, took Alteryx private for about $4.4 billion in 2023, and completed the roughly $7.7 billion purchase of data giant Dun & Bradstreet in 2025 - alongside a much earlier, much smaller trade that has become firm folklore: buying the women's apparel brand Ashley Stewart for around $18 million in 2014 and exiting roughly two years later at many times that. Same playbook, wildly different price tags.
07 / The peopleContinuity as a strategy
In an industry defined by churn, Clearlake's leadership has barely moved. Nearly two decades in, the same two co-founders still run the firm as managing partners - both independently estimated by Forbes at around $3.9 billion in net worth in 2026. Around them sits a team of roughly 250 people working out of Santa Monica with offices reaching Dallas, New York, London, Dublin, Luxembourg, Abu Dhabi, and Singapore. For a manager overseeing ~$90 billion, that is a deliberately lean payroll, and the founders' continuous presence is part of the sell to investors: the people who designed the strategy are still the people running it.
08 / Where it fitsA specialist among giants
In the market map, Clearlake sits between the mega-managers and the pure sector shops. It competes with Thoma Bravo, Vista Equity Partners, and Silver Lake for software deals; with Platinum Equity and Apollo Global Management on operations-heavy and special-situations investing; and with Blackstone, KKR, and Carlyle wherever credit and large buyouts overlap. It is smaller than the diversified giants and broader than the single-sector specialists. The position it has carved is the one it keeps describing back to investors: a sector-focused operator that would rather rebuild a business than simply own it.
09 / The timelineTwenty years, briefly
- 2006Clearlake is founded in Santa MonicaThree founders launch a flexible firm spanning buyouts and distressed securities.
- 2014The Ashley Stewart tradeA ~$18M apparel-brand purchase becomes a signature operational-turnaround exit.
- 2015Two managing partners take the helmEghbali and Feliciano formalize the sector-focused, O.P.S.-driven strategy.
- 2021Cornerstone OnDemand take-privateA ~$5.2B deal deepens the enterprise-software franchise.
- 2022Chelsea FC acquisitionThe Boehly-Clearlake consortium completes the ~$3B purchase of the club.
- 2025Clearlake Credit launches; Dun & Bradstreet closesMV Credit anchors a new credit platform; the ~$7.7B data deal completes.
- 2026$14.8B Fund VIIIThe eighth flagship closes, positioned around AI-driven transformation.
10 / At a glanceThe facts
- Legal name
- Clearlake Capital Group, L.P.
- Founded
- 2006
- Headquarters
- Santa Monica, California
- AUM
- ~$90 billion
- Core sectors
- Technology · Industrials · Consumer
- Team size
- ~250-270 people
- Framework
- O.P.S. - Operations, People, Strategy
- Best-known asset
- Chelsea FC (co-owner)
For a firm that spends most of its time inside businesses the public never sees, Clearlake has built a very public reputation. But the football club is the part you notice. The repeatable habit of buying overlooked companies and quietly making them run better is the part that got it to $90 billion.