The O'Neil Group

The O'Neil Group

The O'Neil Group operates from Colorado Springs under the direction of founder and CEO Kevin O'Neil. The firm invests across two primary asset classes — operating businesses and real estate — with a focus on control transactions and long-duration value creation. Its business strategy spans buyout, growth, and early-stage investments, with a portfolio concentration in the aerospace and defense technology sectors. The real estate arm centers on the redevelopment of underutilized urban properties into technology and innovation hubs. The firm's most visible holding is Braxton Science & Technology Group, which O'Neil acquired in 2008 from California and relocated to Colorado Springs. Over twelve years, Braxton completed four add-on acquisitions and now employs 400 people. In the real estate vertical, O'Neil purchased a three-building campus around the historic Santa Fe Railroad Depot in 2015 and transformed it into the Catalyst Campus, a collaboration space for small business, academia, and government focused on delivering capability to the Air Force and Space Force. An economic impact study found the campus has supported over 1,000 jobs and generated an estimated $270 million in combined direct, indirect, and induced economic effects for the downtown Colorado Springs economy. O'Neil also runs a community-investment practice that blends private-public partnerships with philanthropic support for local non-profits. In 2019, Kevin O'Neil was named Business Citizen of the Year by the Colorado Springs Chamber and Economic Development Corporation, an acknowledgment of both his business acquisitions and his capital deployments into civic projects. The firm extends co-investment access to other community members, as demonstrated during the Braxton acquisition, which was syndicated among multiple Colorado Springs investors. The O'Neil Group's structural differentiator is its dual-asset model, linking the redevelopment of physical real estate into technology campuses with the scaling of defense-and-aerospace operating companies housed within those campuses. The Catalyst Campus serves as both a balance-sheet asset and a strategic platform that attracts tenants, acquisition targets, and government R&D partnerships — creating a self-reinforcing loop uncommon among generalist asset managers.