Fifteen minutes at an airport coffee shop is an unpromising setting for a career change. There is hardly time to settle in, and airports have a gift for making even an ordinary conversation feel provisional. In 2018, however, Nazar Massouh offered Alessia Restivo precisely that opening. He was visiting Grand Rapids from New York over Thanksgiving break. A connection through Aquinas College’s AQ Advantage Center brought them together. Restivo accepted the short meeting. By Christmas, she had secured her first job after graduation.
The job was at Orion Energy Partners, where she became an accounting analyst. Massouh was its chief executive. The encounter makes a useful starting point for a financier whose professional biography otherwise comes measured in funds, financing structures, and energy projects. A small appointment sits beside a career spent arranging large commitments. Both involve giving someone the means to take a next step.
Today, Massouh is CEO and Founding Partner of OIC, the firm formerly called Orion Energy Partners. Its business is supplying credit, equity, and growth capital to infrastructure companies. His own route into that business began with power-plant development, moved through banking, and eventually led to a firm of his own. The airport meeting offers a human-scale way into a story whose numbers can become rather large.
Before the fund, the power plant
Massouh started his career at NRG Energy, working in power-plant development and project finance. He participated in more than $6 billion of energy projects and rose to Assistant Treasurer and Head of Project Finance. Those are useful details because they place his beginnings inside an energy company, close to the task of getting projects financed, before his later roles allocating capital to other businesses.
A power plant gives financial language a physical address. The capital has to support something that can be built and operated. The machinery, the construction schedule, and the eventual sale of electricity all belong to the same undertaking. That practical relationship between money and an asset runs through Massouh’s subsequent career, even as the institutions and financial instruments change.
At Beal Bank in Dallas, he originated and structured nearly $1 billion in energy-project mezzanine and debt investments. Then came seven years at Goldman Sachs, developing fixed-income and commodity-financing solutions for energy companies. He became a managing director in its Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities division. The progression brought together project experience, lending, and the financial treatment of businesses exposed to commodity markets.
From 2011 to 2015, he led an investment team at Energy Capital Partners covering areas including midstream infrastructure, oil-field services, and power generation. He was portfolio manager of its $805 million Mezzanine Opportunities Fund. By the time he co-founded Orion in 2015, the work of financing energy assets had occupied several chapters of his professional life. The new firm gave that experience an independent home.
- NRG EnergyDevelopment & project finance
- Beal Bank & Goldman SachsEnergy lending & financing
- Energy Capital Partners2011-2015 · Private credit
- OICCo-founded in 2015
A business outgrows its name
Orion Energy Partners became Orion Infrastructure Capital in June 2022. A name change is usually an occasion for a new logo and a generous helping of adjectives. Here, there was a concrete explanation: the portfolio had broadened. Seven years after its founding, the firm had built 23 investments, and its activities extended beyond the energy label.
Massouh explained that energy remained central while investment partnerships had expanded into other infrastructure subsectors. OIC’s remit included digital infrastructure, waste and recycling, water, transportation, and agriculture alongside power and fuels. The new name gave those businesses a place on the letterhead. It also made the connecting idea easier to see: companies operating the systems through which goods, resources, energy, and information move.
That breadth is visible in the firm’s later credit portfolio. DartPoints operates regional data centers. Gevo North Dakota combines renewable-fuel operations with carbon capture and storage. Eagle LNG serves maritime and utility customers, while Shaw is a port facility at Lake Charles. These businesses perform different jobs. Their inclusion in one financing strategy shows how widely the infrastructure category can stretch.
The point is practical for a business owner. A financing requirement rarely arrives neatly labeled with an investor’s preferred sector. It arrives as a need to expand, acquire an asset, or support operations. OIC’s chosen territory allows it to consider several kinds of physical and digital systems while retaining its focus on middle-market companies. Massouh’s career supplies the energy-finance background; the firm’s name acknowledges the wider field.
The expensive part of an idea
Infrastructure has a stubborn preference for equipment. A proposal can be beautifully concise; the facility required to carry it out usually has other plans. OIC describes its investment approach in terms of flexible capital backed by hard assets. It works with private-company owners and managers, offering financing designed around their businesses rather than a single standard arrangement.
The firm puts credit, equity, and growth capital in its toolkit. Each creates a different relationship between an investor and a company. Debt brings repayment obligations. Equity links the investor to ownership. The usefulness of either depends on the business and the terms. For Massouh, whose earlier work included project finance and mezzanine credit, those distinctions have been part of the job for years.
OIC also describes dedicated work on risk mitigation, portfolio construction, and commodity hedging. That gives the word “partnership” some operational substance. A financing agreement creates an ongoing set of responsibilities, with decisions to make as the company develops. The work continues after the celebratory announcement and the photograph of people looking pleased.
The environmental part of OIC’s approach follows a similarly concrete sequence. Its responsible-investment process includes assessing risks before an investment, putting targeted covenants into agreements, and collecting information afterward. The firm presents sustainability considerations as part of investment judgment and portfolio oversight. A reader can distinguish that stated process from an outcome: a policy describes what the institution undertakes to do; results require measurement over time.
The organization behind the transaction
Massouh’s public comments return repeatedly to the people doing the work. On LinkedIn, he described using CEO Coaching International to help Orion manage growth and improve communication, efficiency, staff development, and organizational structure. He identified developing the team as a key objective. The admission is interesting because it treats running an investment firm as a management task with its own demands.
The same concern appears in a less glamorous piece of company history. In 2020, Orion selected DealCloud to centralize information and streamline processes. Massouh described a network encompassing prospective investments, banks, lenders, institutional investors, equity providers, consultants, and industry intermediaries. Once there are enough relationships, keeping track of them becomes a business problem in its own right. Even a relationship-driven firm needs somewhere sensible to put the relationships.
By February 2026, OIC was announcing promotions across investment, legal, technology, finance, and investor-development functions. Gerrit Nicholas became Executive Chairman, and Rui Viana became Chief Investment Officer. Massouh remained CEO and Founding Partner. The announcement described a firm distributing responsibility across an expanding organization, including areas that rarely appear in a headline about a new investment.
“At OIC, advancement is earned through ownership, creativity, judgment, and results,” Massouh said. The wording connects promotion to work rather than tenure. It is also a statement of the culture he wants the firm to maintain. In the context of his earlier comments about coaching and systems, the promotions show a continuing concern with how the institution functions as it grows.
“At OIC, advancement is earned through ownership, creativity, judgment, and results.”
Nazar Massouh · February 2026
A larger fund, a familiar problem
In March 2026, OIC announced the final close of Credit Opportunities Fund IV at approximately $1.58 billion, against a $1.1 billion target. About 90 percent of Fund III’s institutional investors returned. The announcement also reported more than $500 million raised through an inaugural rated-note feeder. Those figures describe the fundraise and its participants, rather than the future performance of its investments.
The milestones came ten years after the first close of the firm’s first independent fund on March 31, 2016. By the Fund IV announcement, OIC had completed more than 50 investments. Massouh credited the team’s decade of work alongside co-founder Gerrit Nicholas. Fund III had closed in 2021 at $1.079 billion, providing an earlier marker of the platform’s development.
For a chief executive, a larger fund brings an enlarged assignment. Capital raised has to be put to work with the promised discipline. OIC said Fund IV would continue financing middle-market infrastructure businesses through structured arrangements, and more than 30 percent of its capital was already committed when the close was announced. The scale had changed; the business still depended on finding companies, assessing assets, and agreeing workable terms.
Commitments, not investment returns.
The connection that stayed
The New York career has kept a connection to Grand Rapids. Massouh graduated from Aquinas College in 1995, magna cum laude, in international business and mathematics. He later earned a Master of International Management with distinction at Thunderbird. There is also a sporting entry in the college record: golf, with academic All-American recognition and the Joseph Baker Award in 1995.
In November 2022, he joined the Aquinas Board of Trustees. He and his wife Jennifer had continued supporting the college, and he maintained a relationship with Sister Mary Aquinas Weber. Speaking about the appointment, he described education as an area where he and Jennifer believed they could make an impact. The appointment made his continuing involvement an institutional responsibility as well as a personal connection.
The pattern gives the airport encounter its larger context. A graduate returns to the college network after building a career elsewhere. A younger graduate receives an introduction. Years later, the older graduate takes a trustee’s seat. These are different ways for a relationship with a college to continue long after the degree has been awarded.
Massouh’s professional story moves through increasingly substantial pools of capital, but its most memorable scene remains modest: a coffee shop, a young graduate, and a short opening in a travel schedule. Infrastructure finance depends on assets and agreements. Institutions also depend on people being willing to make time. Fifteen minutes was enough to begin.