ITE Management

Brian Gelfand and Jason Koenig founded ITE in 2014 after leaving BlueMountain Capital, where they sourced and structured asset-backed credit investments. Their move anticipated a secular pullback by commercial banks from middle-market hard-asset lending, a market gap ITE was purpose-built to fill.

ITE sources through direct relationships with equipment owners, operators, lessors, and brokers across rail, aviation, intermodal, and renewable-energy sectors. The firm's credit-oriented, hard-asset focus attracts borrowers who need specialized structuring that traditional banks no longer provide for mid-size fleets.

ITE invests exclusively in infrastructure credit — primarily senior secured loans and asset-backed facilities — rather than equity. The firm holds a first-lien position on physical, revenue-producing assets like railcar fleets and solar equipment, collecting contractual yield and principal while leaving the residual equity ownership to the operator.

The portfolio concentrates on transportation and energy-transition assets: railcars, intermodal containers, commercial aircraft, and solar or wind-energy equipment. These are movable, standardized, revenue-generating physical assets with established secondary markets, which ITE can repossess and remarket if a loan sours.

ITE is headquartered in New York with an additional office in Chicago. The firm sources and underwrites primarily across North America, with a secondary but growing European presence — especially for transportation-asset pools that naturally cross borders like container and aircraft financing.

As a private credit manager, ITE charges management fees and carried interest on its commingled vehicles, targeting high-single to low-double-digit net returns. The yield derives from contractual spread on floating-rate or fixed-rate asset-backed loans, with downside cushioned by physical collateral that independently generates lease revenue.

ITE is a separate firm with no ongoing corporate linkage to BlueMountain Capital. The founding partners previously worked at BlueMountain, where they developed the asset-backed credit expertise that ITE now operates as an independent, partnership-owned platform.