Lee Equity Partners

Thomas H. Lee founded Lee Equity Partners in 2006 after stepping away from Thomas H. Lee Partners, the large-cap private equity firm he established in 1974. The two firms are entirely separate legal entities with no shared ownership, investment committees, or portfolio overlap. Lee Equity targets middle-market control investments, while THL now operates independently under different leadership.

Lee Equity focuses on companies with EBITDA between $10 million and $50 million. The firm typically writes equity checks in the range of $50 million to $150 million, targeting control positions in North American businesses across healthcare services, financial services, and business services.

Lee Equity closed Fund IV at approximately $1.3 billion in 2022, exceeding its $1 billion target (per Buyouts, 2022). The firm has raised over $3.8 billion cumulatively since its 2006 founding. Fund IV continues the manager's strategy of maintaining a concentrated portfolio of middle-market platform companies.

Lee Equity is led by its partnership group, which includes long-tenured partners Yoo Jin Kim and David Morrison, who were promoted in 2023 after founder Thomas H. Lee's passing. The investment committee operates collectively, and the firm has deliberately engineered a generational transition to institutionalize decision-making beyond its founder.

Lee Equity is primarily a control investor and rarely takes minority positions. The firm will occasionally partner with co-investors on larger transactions, but its standard model involves acquiring majority stakes and installing operational resources to drive value creation. It does not run a minority-growth or structured-equity strategy.