H2 Equity Partners

Investment decisions are led by Managing Partner Gert Jan van der Hoeven, who founded the firm in 1991. The partnership operates with a flat structure where senior investment professionals and operating partners collaborate on deal underwriting. Day-to-day management of portfolio companies is often handled by H2-appointed interim executives drawn from the firm's network of operational talent.

H2 sources transactions by positioning itself as a capable buyer of complex situations that deter conventional sponsors. The firm actively engages with corporate sellers undertaking carve-outs, banks managing non-performing loan books, insolvency practitioners, and family-owned businesses facing succession crises. Its decades-long presence in the Benelux and DACH regions provides deep relationships with local advisory, legal, and banking communities.

H2 Equity Partners is a conventional private equity fund manager, not a family office. It raises closed-end commingled funds from institutional limited partners. The most recent vehicle, H2 Equity Partners V, closed in 2023 at €600 million (per the firm's official communications).

H2 targets control buyouts of mid-market companies with enterprise values generally between €20 million and €150 million. The firm does not invest in venture-stage, growth equity, or minority positions. Its mandate covers mature businesses requiring operational restructuring, strategic repositioning, or balance-sheet repair.

H2 Equity Partners avoids real estate, financial services, and pure technology businesses with no tangible operating assets. The firm's restructuring playbook requires stable industrial or consumer cash flows that can be stabilized through operational improvements — not sector bets on growth or multiple expansion in asset-light industries.

H2 does not regularly co-invest alongside other private equity firms and does not operate a co-investor club or LP co-investment program. The firm acts as a lead or sole sponsor in virtually all its transactions, consistent with its control-oriented, operationally intensive investment model.

H2 explicitly targets complexity — management buy-ins, corporate orphan carve-outs, public-to-privates, and restructurings that require operational and strategic intervention. The firm deploys dedicated operating partners and interim executives into portfolio companies, reflecting a hands-on, interventionist style rather than a financial-engineering approach to buyouts.