USIC

USIC

Founded in 1978 and headquartered in Indianapolis, USIC grew into the largest private underground utility locating firm in the United States. The company was built organically and through acquisitions, most notably the 2017 merger with Consolidated Utility Services and the acquisitions of Blood Hound and On Target Utility Services, consolidating a fragmented contractor base under a single national platform. The wealth origin is institutional private equity — USIC was acquired by Partners Group in 2017, then taken private again in a 2023 transaction led by OMERS Infrastructure and the firm's management. USIC's strategy centers on recurring, non-discretionary service contracts with blue-chip utility and telecom operators. The firm locates and marks buried infrastructure — gas, electric, fiber, water systems — for over 900 customers including AT&T, Comcast, and major energy distributors. Its asset-class mix is operational infrastructure services, with revenue derived from call-before-you-dig mandates and ongoing fiber-to-the-home buildouts. Deployment is concentrated in technician labor, specialized vehicle fleets, and proprietary data-collection systems that integrate with client asset registries. Geographic coverage spans all 50 U.S. states and parts of Canada, with a field force of more than 10,000 technicians completing roughly 90 million locate requests annually. USIC reached an enterprise value of approximately $4.5 billion when OMERS Infrastructure acquired a controlling stake in late 2023, alongside existing management and co-investors. The firm fields one of the largest specialized workforces in the infrastructure-services sector, organized into regional hubs that dispatch technicians within hours of a request. Adjacent vehicles include a dedicated training infrastructure — USIC operates its own certification center in Indianapolis — and a growing utility-services division that offers subsurface mapping and data analytics. In November 2023, OMERS Infrastructure announced the completion of its acquisition of USIC from Partners Group and other selling shareholders, positioning the firm for expanded geographic and service-line growth. USIC's structural differentiator is its unmatched technician density in a regulatory-moat market. Nearly every state requires utility line locating before excavation, creating a legally mandated demand pool that scales with infrastructure and telecom investment. Competitors are local or regional; USIC is the only independent firm capable of servicing national accounts with a single contract, giving it pricing power and stickiness that smaller operators cannot replicate. This consolidated, compliance-driven model makes USIC an infrastructure-adjacent annuity rather than a cyclical industrial company.