How One Investor Built a $70 Billion Firm — and Why He Kept the Focus Small

Private equity firms tend to chase scale. Once a fund gets big enough, the logic goes, it can compete for the largest deals, attract the most prestigious limited partners, and command the highest management fees. Sami Mnaymneh took a different view.

Mnaymneh co-founded H.I.G. Capital in Miami in 1993 with a specific segment in mind: the middle market. These are companies too small for the megafund world and too large for most banks to serve well — businesses with revenues in the tens or hundreds of millions, usually family-owned or founder-led, often carrying operational inefficiencies that an experienced investor could address.

More than 30 years later, that focus has produced one of the more consequential private equity buildouts in recent memory. H.I.G. now manages $70 billion across equity, credit, real estate, and infrastructure strategies, with offices stretching from Miami and New York to London, Dubai, and Hong Kong.

Sami Mnaymneh’s Route to Private Equity

Mnaymneh’s academic and professional credentials are unusual even by Wall Street standards. He graduated top of his class from Columbia University, then earned both a law degree and an MBA from Harvard, completing the joint program with honors. He started at Morgan Stanley and later became a managing director at The Blackstone Group before leaving to start H.I.G.

Those experiences informed how he structured H.I.G. from the beginning. Rather than building a firm of generalists, Mnaymneh and co-founder Tony Tamer staffed the firm with professionals who had operating backgrounds — people who had run factories, managed supply chains, or restructured companies — not just dealmakers.

That model has attracted a broad investor base. When H.I.G. WhiteHorse closed Fund IV at $5.9 billion earlier this year, the capital came from pensions, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, foundations, and family offices across North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. It is a diverse investor profile that reflects how seriously large institutional allocators have come to take H.I.G.’s credit platform.

Deals Across Sectors — and Borders

H.I.G.’s portfolio at any given moment spans an eclectic mix of industries. The firm has backed jewelry brands, healthcare technology companies, industrial suppliers, European occupational health providers, and logistics businesses. What connects them is less the sector and more the situation: companies at an inflection point where capital and operational expertise can make a difference.

H.I.G. has also been active in European middle-market buyouts. The firm’s Europe Capital Partners III fund closed at €1.1 billion, extending a strategy that mirrors the U.S. playbook in markets where mid-sized companies face similar structural underservice from large financial institutions.

Mnaymneh has said publicly that the firm’s mission is to work closely with portfolio companies to produce strong investment returns, and that a hands-on culture gives H.I.G. a durable edge. Whether that holds across another decade of growth — as the firm’s asset base expands and more capital competes for fewer good deals — remains the central question for the firm he built.

For now, the numbers suggest it is working. H.I.G. has invested in more than 400 companies since founding, generating combined revenues across current and past portfolio businesses that exceed $53 billion — a track record that has kept Mnaymneh among Florida’s wealthiest investors and made H.I.G. one of the most active private equity firms in the world.