PREMIUM Equity Partners

Marcel van Wijk is the Gründungs- und Managing Partner and leads the firm’s investment activity. A group of named operating partners and advisory partners — including Pieter van Halem, Berthold Hackl, Bernd Kuhlin, and Dr. Wolfgang Rebstock — hold board or advisory chair roles at individual portfolio companies and influence strategy at the asset level.

The firm concentrates on succession-driven situations in the DACH region, typically originating opportunities where Mittelstand founders need an ownership transition and are receptive to an external management buy-in. Because it does not compete in broad auctions for growth-stage assets, the pipeline relies on relationships with family owners, local intermediaries, and its reputation for deploying buy-in CEOs who replace, rather than supplement, incumbent management.

It functions as a private equity fund manager, not a family office. The firm raised its first two Mittelstand-focused funds in partnership with Bankhaus Lampe, pooling third-party institutional commitments. Marcel van Wijk and the partners participate as principals alongside those limited partners, but the vehicle structure and fee model align with a conventional closed-end European buyout fund.

The mandate covers management buy-in, management buyout, succession, and corporate divestiture. The firm enters as a majority owner in established, cash-generating Mittelstand companies — not venture-stage or early-growth rounds — and uses add-on acquisitions to expand geographic reach, as it demonstrated by pushing heinekingmedia into Switzerland and Austria.

The firm states publicly that it invests only in companies that make a positive contribution — economically and socially — and its listed sector focus excludes fossil-fuel extraction, heavy commodities, speculative biotech, and defense manufacturing. The explicit targets are healthcare and medtech, software and connectivity, consumer and lifestyle goods, and niche industrial technology.

The firm has not disclosed co-investment programs for third-party LPs, but it did raise its first two funds with Bankhaus Lampe, indicating comfort pooling institutional capital in a conventional limited-partner structure. Within individual deals, management teams are invited to co-invest at entry, which aligns incentives but keeps the vehicle structure central to the investment.

No publicly disclosed foundation, philanthropic trust, or separate operating company is recorded. The firm’s public footprint is limited to the fund management entity and the operating partner bench that sits across portfolio-company boards.