New Mountain Capital

Founder and CEO Steven Klinsky retains ultimate authority over the private equity strategy and overall firm direction. Day-to-day leadership is split: Adam Weinstein serves as President and COO, John Kline runs the credit business as its President and CEO, and Teddy Kaplan leads the net lease strategy as its President and CEO. The firm maintains an Operating Partner Group led by Albert Notini, which embeds into portfolio companies post-acquisition.

The firm targets sectors where underlying demand is largely independent of economic cycles — healthcare, software, business services, data and analytics. Klinsky has argued consistently that business building in acyclical niches is a more reliable path to returns than reliance on leverage or multiple expansion. This philosophy extends to the credit and net lease strategies, which apply the same industry screens.

New Mountain Capital is an institutional asset manager, not a family office. Steven Klinsky contributed the initial seeding capital and remains the controlling shareholder, but the firm raises third-party capital from pensions, endowments, and sovereign wealth funds. New Mountain Finance Corporation, its publicly traded BDC, provides additional permanent capital.

The flagship strategy targets majority-control buyouts and growth equity in mid-to-large cap companies. New Mountain Strategic Equity, launched more recently, makes non-control minority investments. The firm has also executed PIPEs, management buyouts, and recapitalizations, but its core competence remains acquiring and building platform companies.

Both strategies share a centralized research function and apply the same defensive-growth industry screens. The credit team, led by John Kline, originates senior and subordinated loans to companies in the same acyclical sectors the equity team targets, often developing relationships that inform future equity investments. The firm also issues CLOs and manages a publicly traded BDC.

The firm prefers leading or controlling investments and rarely co-invests passively alongside external GPs. Its non-control Strategic Equity fund takes minority positions, but New Mountain requires board representation and operational engagement even in those stakes. The firm has accepted strategic minority investments itself — Blackstone acquired a passive minority interest in New Mountain in 2019.

The firm's defensive-growth mandate effectively excludes deep-cyclical industries such as upstream energy, commodities, and most consumer discretionary. While no formal exclusion list is published, Klinsky's public statements and the portfolio's composition indicate avoidance of sectors where demand correlates strongly with GDP expansion, construction cycles, or commodity prices.