The least glamorous phrase in New Mountain Capital's vocabulary may be its most revealing: defensive growth. It describes companies that can expand without asking the economy for permission - the laboratory supplier whose products remain necessary, the software system embedded in a workflow, the contractor maintaining a power grid, the service that catches errors in health-care payments. These are not necessarily quiet companies. They simply sell things customers are reluctant, or unable, to stop buying.
Founder Steven Klinsky organized New Mountain around that idea in 1999, after helping establish Goldman Sachs's leveraged buyout group and spending 15 years at Forstmann Little. A quarter-century later, the New York firm manages roughly $60 billion. Its range now includes controlling and minority private equity, direct lending, broadly syndicated loans, collateralized loan obligations and net-lease real estate. The products look different. The intellectual machinery behind them is deliberately similar.
Don't predict the cycle. Choose around it.
New Mountain starts with industries, not a parade of whatever happens to be for sale. Its teams conduct what the firm calls deep dives into niches such as health technology, life-science supplies, specialized software, information and data, technology-enabled business services, infrastructure field services and financial technology. The screening questions are practical: Is the market growing? Does the company lead a narrow category? Do customers renew? Are there barriers to entry? What happens to cash flow in an ugly scenario?
This is where the firm sits in the market. It is an alternative asset manager aimed chiefly at the middle market, but with the capital and staff of a much larger platform. A typical flagship equity check ranges from $100 million to $500 million, usually for a company valued between $100 million and $1 billion. Strategic Equity can take a minority position when control is unavailable. Credit targets U.S. middle-market borrowers, often with $10 million to $200 million of EBITDA. Net lease handles transactions from $10 million to $500 million involving properties the tenant needs to run its business.
Private equity
Control or minority stakes, plus capital and operating help to expand the company.
Credit
Loans and CLOs selected with research borrowed from the equity platform.
Net lease
Factories, labs and other properties essential to a tenant's operation.
The customers on one side are capital providers: pension funds, insurers, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, foundations, asset managers, family offices, registered investment advisers and eligible individual investors. New Mountain Partners VII, the firm's latest flagship control fund, closed in 2024 with $15.4 billion from roughly 400 institutions and the general partner. The GP commitment was about $1.4 billion, funded by more than 130 people inside New Mountain.
On the other side are management teams and sponsors looking for an owner, minority partner, lender or real-estate financier. Their problem is rarely just a shortage of cash. A growing middle-market company may need an acquisition pipeline, a better sales organization, upgraded technology, a deeper executive bench or patient financing that recognizes its niche. New Mountain sells a bundle: capital plus sector knowledge plus operating capacity.
“We strive to continuously improve in the years ahead.”Steven Klinsky, founder and CEO
The product is capital. The service is construction.
Once it invests, the firm can help recruit executives and directors, build financial controls, introduce sales contacts, finance research and development, upgrade infrastructure, implement digital tools, enter new markets and execute add-on acquisitions. This list sounds like a management-consulting engagement because the distinction is intentional. New Mountain describes itself as “a business that builds businesses.” The preferred return is meant to come from a larger, more profitable company, not merely a more aggressively financed one.
That does not remove risk. Private companies can stumble, loans can default, real estate can lose tenants, and a supposedly defensive niche can be disrupted. Nor does “acyclical” mean immune to recession. The difference is an emphasis. New Mountain says it generally uses debt moderately at acquisition and in some cases none at all. Its public materials report no private-equity portfolio-company bankruptcy or missed interest payment since inception. That record is a historical claim, not a promise about the next deal.
The reuse of knowledge is the interesting competitive feature. A software specialist helping an equity team understand recurring revenue can also sharpen a credit decision. A credit team may have already studied a prospective net-lease tenant. A portfolio-company relationship can reveal acquisition targets. The firm pays for the research infrastructure once, then applies the learning at several points in the capital structure.
Net lease makes the mechanism unusually visible. New Mountain buys or funds a property - perhaps a specialized industrial plant, medical facility or data-infrastructure site - and leases it for a long term to the operating company. Its platform reports more than 80 deals, roughly $4 billion of purchase price and over 37 million square feet acquired. The attraction is not an office tower whose value depends on tomorrow's rent market. It is the building a carefully underwritten tenant needs to keep making or delivering something.
A scoreboard built for private equity's awkward question.
After the 2008 financial crisis, the industry faced a blunt challenge: what, beyond investor returns, did buyout firms create? New Mountain began publishing a Social Dashboard. Its eighteenth edition reported that private-equity portfolio companies had added or created approximately 101,100 jobs through the end of 2025, net of losses, while investing more than $10.4 billion in research, software and capital expenditures. The same report put cumulative enterprise-value gains near $112 billion.
Those numbers are supplied by the firm and include defined methodologies, so they should be read as a management scoreboard rather than an independent social-impact audit. Still, the choice of metrics is instructive. Jobs, wages and productive investment sit beside financial value. The dashboard turns New Mountain's central claim - that building healthier companies can serve investors and employees at once - into something the public can inspect annually.
Sustainability is handled in a similarly procedural way. Prospective private-equity investments are screened through RepRisk and 24 environmental, social and governance metrics. Newer holdings receive industry-specific analysis informed by SASB standards, followed by tailored plans and annual data collection. The firm belongs to the United Nations-backed Principles for Responsible Investment and the ESG Data Convergence Initiative. This is less a green label than a risk-and-operations checklist: pollution, privacy, worker retention, product safety, board composition and compliance can all become financial issues.
From institutions to the adviser down the street.
New Mountain's next market is not an industry to acquire. It is a customer channel. In 2025 the firm launched Wealth Solutions to support registered investment advisers and their clients. The move follows a wider migration of private-market products beyond pensions and endowments. It also creates a service problem: individual advisers need education, operations and client support that an institutional fundraising team was not built to provide. By October 2025, New Mountain had named William Dunigan to lead the group.
Meanwhile, the investment menu keeps widening without abandoning its organizing filter. Credit, launched in 2008, reported roughly $14 billion in assets and about $33 billion invested since inception in the firm's 2025 review. Strategic Equity Fund II closed in January 2026 with $1.2 billion for minority partnerships. The net-lease arm completed its first $493 million asset-backed securitization in late 2025. Offices in Tokyo, Mexico City and Seoul extend sourcing and investor coverage beyond New York.
A middle-market management team can pursue a majority recapitalization, minority growth investment, direct loan or sale-leaseback. The useful question is not “Does this firm provide capital?” It plainly does. It is “Does our market fit the defensive-growth map, and will its operating network make us better?”
Recent transactions show the map in motion. New Mountain combined SmarterDx, Thoughtful.ai and Access Healthcare into Smarter Technologies, a health-care intelligence and services platform. It partnered with SAM, whose geospatial data and inspection work supports utilities and transportation infrastructure. In August 2026 it announced an agreement to acquire Jensen Hughes, a fire-protection engineering and risk consultancy. Elsewhere, it agreed to sell Cumming Group after a period of expansion in project and cost management.
The alternatives are formidable. Blackstone, KKR, Carlyle, Apollo and Ares offer broader global menus. Firms such as Clearlake, Genstar, Thoma Bravo, Vista and Leonard Green compete for many of the same businesses and executives. New Mountain's answer is specialization by method: pick fewer economic ponds, map them deeply, and keep using that map whether the firm is buying the company, lending to it or owning the ground beneath its machines.
That is the stealable lesson. Scale does not have to mean collecting unrelated products. It can mean finding a decision system sturdy enough to reuse. “Defensive growth” is not magic, and every investment still comes down to price, judgment and execution. But it gives 300 people a common way to look at thousands of opportunities. For a firm that sells decisions, a shared language may be the most valuable piece of infrastructure it owns.