middle-market
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Aurigin wants your next deal to begin with a better introduction
In private markets, the right person is often outside your address book. Aurigin combines algorithms, banking analysts and mutual consent to make that introduction without announcing your business to the world.
The Small Agency That Made Measurement Its Main Character
The Shepherd Group began with writers and production people. Three decades later, it sells something harder to package: a chain of evidence from the first question to the final business result.
The Deal Closes. Then the People Problem Begins.
Allegrow works in the awkward stretch after the handshake, when two companies have to become one without losing the people, customers, and value that made the deal attractive.
HUB International Canada’s Quiet Playbook: Keep the Local Broker, Scale Everything Behind Them
HUB’s Canadian machine grew by buying local brokerages without trying to bleach out their local character. The payoff is a useful lesson for any service business trying to scale expertise without turning relationships into a call-centre script.
Percheron’s $8 Billion Bet on the People Who Keep America Running
Percheron Capital is turning fragmented, hands-on trades into scaled service platforms. Its unusual tool kit pairs high-velocity M&A with engineers who build AI alongside the frontline.
The Family Office Buying Everything From Ice Cream to the Pittsburgh Penguins
Hoffmann Family of Companies has assembled more than 200 brands without choosing a single industry. Its real product is patient ownership - and a portfolio designed to make unlikely neighbors useful to one another.
The $60 Billion Firm That Treats Private Equity Like Company Building
New Mountain Capital built a multi-strategy investment platform around a deceptively simple filter: choose businesses people still need when the economy gets strange, then help those businesses grow.
The Private Equity Firm That Wants to Fix Your Checkout
Digital Fuel Capital buys into profitable e-commerce businesses, then sends operators into the unglamorous machinery of growth - traffic, checkout, retention, technology and talent. Its portfolio suggests that the next consumer platform may look less like a single blockbuster brand and more like a well-run collection of niches.
BayPine Is Buying the Businesses Tech Forgot
The Boston private-equity firm sees outdated software as unfinished business. Its wager is that better systems, cleaner data and practical AI can make established companies grow differently.
The Private Equity Firm That Put the Business Model Before the Industry
Uplift Investors raised $670 million on a deceptively simple wager: how a services company makes money can reveal more than the industry label attached to it. Its first deals in legal services show what that thesis looks like once the capital starts moving.
The Firm That Made 'Accelerate Change' a $6 Billion Playbook
For more than two decades, Tailwind Capital has bought the boring, essential companies that keep infrastructure, supply chains and IT running - then quietly compounded them.
The Firm That Bet on Boring and Made $41 Billion
Founded in 1984, Kayne Anderson built a $41 billion alternatives platform by specializing in the unglamorous middle market - oil wells, storage units, and student housing - where cash flow, not hype, does the talking.
The Company That Gets Paid When Everyone Else Gives Up
Founded on the wreckage of a family business, Hilco Global built a $1 billion enterprise by answering one unglamorous question better than anyone: what is this stuff really worth?
The Firm That Bet Against the Buyout Playbook - and Ran It 40 Years
For four decades, a Beverly Hills firm has invested in middle-market companies by lending and owning at the same time. In July 2025 it closed its seventh flagship fund at over $3.6 billion - proof the contrarian model still sells.
PSG’s $30 Billion Bet: Build 100 Software Specialists, Not One Unicorn
The Boston growth-equity firm has turned narrow software focus into a very large machine - pairing capital with operators, acquisitions and an AI push across more than 165 platform investments.
The $11 Billion Firm Built on a Buyout of Its Old Boss
MidOcean Partners started by buying a $1.8 billion private-equity business from Deutsche Bank. Two decades later, its three-part platform shows how a focused middle-market investor can become a capital shop without trying to become everything to everyone.
The Private Equity Firm That Would Rather Own More and Owe Less
Heartwood Partners built its pitch around an unfashionable idea in buyouts: use less debt, leave managers with meaningful ownership, and give operating teams room to grow. In a market trained to chase leverage, restraint has become the product.
The Firm That Bets on the Toolmakers, Not the Cure
For nearly four decades, Ampersand Capital Partners has skipped the lottery of drug discovery and quietly backed the companies that make the drug discovery possible. In May 2026 it closed a $1.5 billion fund in a single day.
The Firm That Buys Companies Nobody Wants - and a Football Club Everybody Watches
Clearlake turned a distressed-debt strategy into a $90 billion machine by fixing unglamorous companies - then bought a Premier League club to prove the point.
The Private Equity Firm That Still Thinks Like a Sawmill
Jones Capital grew out of a one-site Mississippi sawmill, then turned seven decades of operating lessons into a private-capital playbook. Its pitch to founders is unusually plain: patient money, practical help and no predetermined exit clock.
Wind Point Hires the CEO First. Then It Goes Shopping for a Company.
For 42 years the Chicago firm has run the buyout playbook in reverse - recruiting a billion-dollar operator before it writes a check. In July it closed a $3.2 billion fund to keep doing it.
The Private Equity Firm That Grew Out of a Turnaround Shop
Born from one of the world's best-known restructuring firms, A&M Capital bets that operators, not just financiers, make the better owners of mid-sized companies.
The Private-Equity Firm That Hires the CEO Before It Buys the Company
Alpine Investors built an $18.5 billion private-equity firm around an unusual wager: in a business obsessed with deals, the scarce asset is the person who can lead what comes next.
The Firm That Buys the Companies Nobody Puts on a T-Shirt
In Rye, New York, a former Blackstone dealmaker built a private equity firm around a contrarian bet: the least glamorous companies in America - the ones that make labels, insulation, and water pumps - are where the returns hide.
The Private-Equity Firm That Wants the Family Photo to Stay on the Wall
Brightstar Capital Partners sells control without the scorched-earth script. Its pitch to founders is patient capital, an operator’s toolkit and a place at the table after the papers are signed.
The Quiet Compounders of Park Avenue
For 40-plus years, Harvest Partners has bought unglamorous middle-market companies and held them long enough to matter. Here is how a relationship-first shop on Park Avenue turned patience into a $20-billion franchise.
The Pritzkers Built Hyatt and Marmon. Now They Buy the Companies Nobody Will Sell to a Fund.
Tony Pritzker turned a family fortune built on Hyatt and the Marmon Group into a private equity firm that sells patience - and just raised $3.4 billion on the promise it will not rush the exit.
The Firm That Buys Boring and Sells Big
For 40-plus years, DFW Capital Partners has made its money on the companies nobody puts on a magazine cover - fleet washers, infusion clinics, surgical centers - and turned quiet cash flow into a $2 billion track record.
The Cardiologist Who Turned a Single Hotel Into a $3.7 Billion Portfolio
A practicing heart doctor built Encore Enterprises into a diversified real estate and private equity firm that develops apartments, runs emergency rooms and manages dental clinics - all from one office off the Dallas Parkway.
The Private Equity Firm That Refuses to Fire the Founder
For 40 years, RLH Equity Partners has bet on a contrarian idea in private equity: that the founder is the asset, not the problem. Here is how a $1.2 billion Los Angeles firm turned 'high touch meets high tech' into a portfolio worth $4.2 billion in exits.