Catalyst Holdings

Catalyst Holdings

Catalyst Holdings was co-founded by Kevyn DeMartino and Forrest Williams following DeMartino's tenure as Managing Partner at Transition Capital Partners (TCP), a Dallas-based private equity firm focused on the lower middle market. Jake Williams, another TCP Principal, joined as a co-founder before his death in 2025. The firm operates from Dallas, Texas, and structures itself not as a blind-pool fund but as an investment group whose principals write personal checks into every deal — a model designed to eliminate the agency gap between manager and outside capital. The firm targets majority investments in existing entrepreneurial companies with a history of growth and profits, typically below $100 million in revenue and $0–8 million of EBITDA. It also writes growth-capital, special-situation, and seed-stage checks. Deployed capital has touched consumer electronics (JLab Audio), extended-warranty programs (GBS Enterprises), firearms manufacturing (Shadow Systems), diagnostic imaging (Memorial MRI & Diagnostic), and education-software (SuccessEd). Two known exits — LT Energy Services to BE Aerospace in 2014 and Sante Pediatrics to Epic Health Services in 2013 — confirm a willingness to sell into strategic acquirers. Catalyst works across the United States, with portfolio companies concentrated in Texas. Team size is undisclosed, and the firm has not published an AUM or aggregate deployment figure. Partner Justin Mowrey manages the remaining portfolio while also serving at TCP, an overlap that signals a shared back-office and deal-sourcing pipeline between the two Dallas firms. The Catalyst principals support The Pararescue Foundation philanthropically. In a structural echo of the TCP days, Catalyst's website invites prospective partners to speak with past and current founder partners, management teams, and financing sources — a form of reference-based diligence that smaller, principal-funded outfits use as a substitute for institutional track-record verification. Catalyst's differentiator is structural, not sectoral. The firm refuses the institutional LP-return model, instead taking concentrated ownership in a short list of companies where its own money sits alongside external investors. That architecture blurs the line between family office and independent sponsor, and it means Catalyst's deal cadence is slow, its holding periods are long, and its sourcing relies almost entirely on the personal networks of DeMartino and Williams rather than auction processes.