It is increasingly rare for a middle-market private equity firm to pursue a public market exit, but last year Altamont Capital Partners did just that.

In June 2025, the Palo Alto, California-based sponsor listed portfolio company Accelerant Holdings on the NYSE, securing a USD 6.1bn valuation for the insurance risk exchange it had backed since 2019.

For Altamont, this public exit served as validation for a playbook built on backing incumbent management teams with the capital and support needed to scale.

“We provided them with the capital to get the business plan off the ground, and then we worked with them to build a business,” Chase Beeler, a managing director at Altamont, told Mergermarket.

The IPO helped cap a busy year for Altamont on the realization front, with six liquidity events, comprising two exits, as well as dividend distributions at four portfolio companies, according to a 2025 year-end review on the sponsor’s website. As well as Accelerant’s IPO, Altamont sold bank consulting firm Cornerstone Advisors, but the buyer was not named.

On the deployment side, Altamont made one new platform investment, while existing portfolio companies – Bishop Lifting, Horizon, 101, Hadron, Specialized Packaging Group (SPG) and Tacala – made a combined six add-on acquisitions. Earlier this month, Altamont announced an investment in corrugated box manufacturer Key Container.

Altamont is currently deploying its fourth fund, ACP Investment Fund IV, which closed on USD 800m in commitments in 2024. It typically targets companies with between USD 10m-USD 75m in EBITDA. The firm focuses on four verticals: industrials; financial services; business services, and franchising.

Exit paths

Last year’s realization activity helped generate USD 500m in distributions to Altamont’s LPs. For its exits, Altamont has historically engineered a roughly even split between sponsor deals and trade sales. Still, the firm aims to remain flexible in finding the most viable path.

Last year’s Accelerant exit is a case in point. As the IPO market showed signs of reawakening, demonstrating enough depth to absorb larger offerings, the firm recognized that the public market might provide a compelling exit route.

At the same time, the public market was a good fit for Accelerant’s business model. In August 2024, the London- and Atlanta-headquartered firm’s co-founder and CEO, Jeff Radke, told Mergermarket, that a public listing would offer stability and independence, which would be valuable to a tech-enabled risk exchange that connects underwriters with insurance companies and other capital providers.

If an IPO were deemed the right fit for another portfolio company, Altamont could follow the same path again, said Beeler. “We can hold onto investments for a longer period of time and that gives us the ability to pick the right path for the business as opposed to trying to time the market,” he said. “For something like Accelerant, that means we can go for an IPO if we think that’s the right route.”

Altamont’s exit flexibility also extends to timing, even as LPs broadly clamor for more distributions. Sometimes this can mean holding onto assets beyond the typical five-to-seven years, if it sees an opportunity to build further value.

“Once you have built them, you’d better be sure that you’re ready and willing to let them go if they are continuing to compound value and drive a high multiple of money,” said Beeler.

For example, the firm acquired the Taco Bell franchise operator Tacala in 2012 through its debut fund. Over the next twelve years the business expanded from 160 restaurants to 360, while earnings more than quadrupled by 2024. By that point, Altamont saw additional runway for growth but also recognized the need to return capital to its original LPs. In 2024, the firm moved Tacala into a continuation vehicle (CV) anchored by Blue Owl and Pantheon. Although financial terms were not disclosed, the CV allowed Altamont to deliver liquidity to existing investors while raising fresh capital to support the next phase of growth.

“We have a great concept, and we have a great set of playbooks here,” Beeler said of Tacala. “Why shouldn’t we take what they’re doing and extend it into other franchises? To do that will require capital and a CV is a natural solution for that.”

Build and build 

Often Altamont is the first source of institutional capital for the founder and family-owned businesses it partners with.

“We like to invest in businesses where there’s enough heft that you can make those investments often in the first year without having to worry about swamping the earnings,” Beeler said.

Beeler, who heads Altamont’s industrials practice, emphasizes that many of the firm’s investments already have foundations in place to build on. The goal is to grow them into assets that a future owner will view as mature, durable businesses.

Accelerant is a case in point. In the run-up to its IPO, the company’s management team was praised for its ability to run a “complex but impressive” enterprise while achieving rapid growth, as previously reported.

Following Altamont’s acquisition in 2019, the exchange embarked on an acquisition spree, making five add-ons between 2021 and 2023. In 2022, the firm raised an additional USD 190m from Eldridge Industries to “fund growth”, followed by USD 150m in funding from Barings a year later.

By 2024, Radke, the company’s CEO, said that the firm’s business had more than tripled across the prior two years, and that the firm’s business model and financials are in a position where it was no longer dependent on institutional investors with a long-term view.

The numbers reflect this growth trajectory. In 2022, the company recorded adjusted EBITDA losses of USD 39m, but by the following year it generated positive adjusted EBITDA of USD 36m. That figure rose to USD 282m in adjusted EBITDA for 2025, a 149% increase year-over-year.

Add-ons have a role to play in Altamont’s value creation script but are not the core component. M&A is used when an opportunity to consolidate a fragmented corner of the market is identified, to derive synergies between complementary businesses or expand into new markets.

This playbook was rolled out at Bishop Lifting Products, which Altamont carved out of AEA-backed Singer Industrial in 2022. For years, Bishop had primarily serviced oil and gas clients, but that exposure became a liability for Singer after the sector’s downturn in the mid-2010s.

Altamont saw broader potential. “They were still somewhat exposed to upstream oil and gas, but that was not the story around the broader market they serve, which is sizable and diverse,” Beeler said.

Since the carve-out, Altamont has completed eight add-ons for Bishop, diversifying its sector footprint into aerospace and defense, as well as construction. Its most recent add-on came in September 2025 with the purchase of American Rigger’s Supply, a family-operated business out of Kansas City

Like several of its peers, Altamont has also leaned into the trend of onshoring more business operations. From the disruptions wrought by COVID-19 to recent tariff policies, there has been an increased emphasis on onshoring more operations to build supply chain resiliency.

An example of this approach is Specialized Packaging Group (SPG), a protective packaging solutions provider that Altamont acquired in December 2020. Since then, SPG has made five add-ons across North America to build itself into a more vertically integrated provider while still improving operational capacity at its production sites, an executive at the firm previously told Mergermarket.

At the time of the acquisition, SPG operated about 15 locations and generated around USD 127m in revenue, but those figures have more than doubled since then.

“There was a lot of building that had to be done that we could take advantage of there,” said Beeler. “That was what we were doing the first two to three years.”