Moontower

Moontower

Moontower was formed in Austin in 2022 by Russell Valdez and Connor Stewart, a duo who spent over a decade together at Wafra, the roughly $30 billion alternative investment manager. Valdez served as Wafra’s Chief Investment Officer while Stewart was the Managing Director responsible for financial services. The pair launched Moontower as a private investment studio with a deliberately long-duration mandate, drawing on the Austin moonlight-tower icon to signal a 125-year stewardship ethos they aim to bring to control and control-oriented equity positions. The firm’s strategy sits at the intersection of real assets and financial services. Moontower structures itself as a private equity studio, meaning its team works alongside portfolio-company management on operational transformation and growth rather than acting as a passive minority holder. The investment approach covers buyout, expansion and late-stage growth capital, with a preference for building platforms that can compound over decades. Moontower’s stated footprint is concentrated in North America, with a particular lens on opportunities tied to infrastructure-like real assets and specialized financial services businesses. The firm does not disclose a fund-raise cadence or vehicle structure, although the team page lists two operating partners — Brett Gage and Julian Potter — indicating a model that embeds operational talent into its holdings. Moontower operates from a single hub at 1111 West 6th Street in Austin and lists 16 professionals, including a general counsel, a chief financial officer, and a compliance and investor relations function. The team deliberately mixes senior investment professionals with finance-operations and analyst bandwidth, consistent with a studio rather than an assembly-line asset gatherer. In addition to Valdez and Stewart, two principals — Sean McKeon and Code Sternal — provide deal-execution leadership. The firm’s website references a volunteer-spirit culture and a public-minded commitment to community, though no affiliated foundation or charitable vehicle is named. What sets Moontower apart structurally is its explicit rejection of a near-term exit clock. The firm markets no moonshots, instead casting itself as a generational platform builder. That posture — combined with a co-founder group whose prior institution managed capital on behalf of a large permanent-balance-sheet investor — suggests a partnership that prizes patient, control-oriented compounding over vintage-year pressure. The studio architecture further differentiates it from a standard middle-market buyout fund by embedding operating partners and functional specialists directly into the investment platform rather than retaining them as project-based consultants.