Hammer and Company LLC

Hammer and Company LLC

Hammer & Company LLC was founded in 1995 by William H. Hammer Jr., a member of the Hammer family whose wealth originated from Penn Virginia Corporation, a coal and natural resources firm that dated to the 1880s. By 2005, the family had sold its controlling stake in Penn Virginia to fund the family office's independent investment operations. The firm is structured as a multi-family office but operates primarily as a discretionary asset manager deploying family capital across multiple asset classes. The firm's strategy spans private equity and venture capital, real estate and infrastructure, energy and natural resources, hedge funds, and private credit. It primarily makes direct investments and co-investments, often alongside institutional General Partners. Known co-investments include positions in companies such as CoreLogic (real estate data), Cushman & Wakefield (commercial real estate), and Energy Transfer Partners (midstream energy). Geographically, the firm focuses on the United States, with additional exposure to select markets in Western Europe and Canada. The firm does not publicly disclose committed capital figures but has reported at least $100 million in private equity direct investments across 30+ companies as of 2023. Hammer & Company does not market itself publicly and employs a lean team — approximately 15 investment professionals as of 2024, many with backgrounds from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Blackstone. The firm maintains a single office in San Francisco, California. Adjacent to the investment operations, the Hammer family operates the William H. Hammers Foundation, a philanthropic entity focused on education and medical research in Virginia, where the family's roots are based. In 2023, the firm participated in the recapitalization of a midstream energy pipeline project alongside Ares Management. The structural differentiator of Hammer & Company is its deliberate hybrid of family-office discretion and institutional-scale deal execution — it acts like a family office for its primary capital base but deploys in size and style indistinguishable from a middle-market private equity firm. This allows it to take long-term, concentrated positions without the fundraising cycle pressure of a traditional fund, while still accessing co-investment opportunities typically reserved for institutional LPs.