Adelphi Capital Partners

Joe May, Founder and Managing Partner, leads investment decisions. He built the firm after a 25-year career at The Graham Group and as a founder of Graham Partners, where he sat on the investment committee and shared responsibility for sourcing, structuring, and exiting deals. Adelphi’s website lists no other investment committee members, and the operating partners appear focused on diligence and portfolio-company value creation.

Adelphi embeds a sector-specific operating partner into each deal from thesis development through post-close execution. The six operating partners have led product groups and businesses at CertainTeed, Crown Holdings, Rolls-Royce, Dynavac, and American Wholesale Ltd. This stands in contrast to firms that apply a single operating team across unrelated industries. The model aims to replicate the operator-led investment approach May helped develop at Graham Partners.

Adelphi targets founder- and family-owned manufacturing and industrial-services businesses in the lower middle market, with revenue between $10 million and $100 million and EBITDA of $3 million to $15 million. The firm’s disclosed activity and operating partner backgrounds point toward building products, industrial technology, metal and consumer packaging, environmental-control systems, and advanced-manufacturing subsectors.

The firm’s stated geographic focus is the United States and Canada. Joe May’s prior experience at Graham Partners included cross-border M&A in France, Canada, the United Kingdom, Poland, Brazil, and Argentina, but Adelphi’s current criteria and portfolio appear concentrated in North America.

Adelphi has not publicly disclosed assets under management. The firm reports six platform investments since inception and lists 12 professionals on its team. Seven of those are senior partners — May and six operating partners — while the remainder are investment analysts and associates. The firm’s deployed portfolio and small team suggest it operates at a smaller scale than the institutional funds May previously helped run.

Joe May co-founded Graham Partners and worked there for over two decades before leaving to form Adelphi. There is no disclosed ongoing legal or economic linkage between the two firms. However, Adelphi’s strategy — lower-middle-market manufacturing deals led by industry-specific operating executives — closely mirrors the Graham model May helped build. Several Adelphi operating partners (Chuck Campbell, Tom Smith, Bob Rumer) also worked with May at CertainTeed-related businesses, a familiar nexus in the building-products sector.

Adelphi’s public materials do not outline a co-investment program or disclose limited partners. The firm describes itself as a private investment group and lists no fund structures, suggesting it may invest off a committed or deal-by-deal capital base rather than a blind-pool fund. At Graham Partners, May regularly structured co-investments alongside the fund, but Adelphi has not disclosed similar arrangements.