Apollo neden küçük bir Appalachian içecek üreticisini destekledi?

Why Apollo backed a small Appalachian beverage manufacturer

Wed, August 12, 2026 at 3:51 AM GMT+3 3 min read

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Monogram Capital Partners said Tuesday it closed a single-asset continuation fund for its portfolio company, Mountaintop Beverage, whose manufacturing buildout would take longer than its fund's remaining life.

Apollo S3 led the continuation fund, which was sized at about $300 million, Jared Stein, co-founder and partner of Monogram, told PitchBook.

Others in the Mountaintop CV, which are not typical secondary investors, included Partners Capital, an OCIO that manages more than $75 billion for institutions and wealthy individuals. H7 Capital, a single-family office, also came in as a new investor. TIFF, an employee-owned OCIO with roughly $10 billion in assets, is a longtime Monogram investor across multiple funds; it rolled a portion of its Mountaintop stake, took some liquidity off the table, and committed additional capital.

Stein added that Monogram first connected with Apollo late last year, when it was seeking a co-investment to finance an add-on for Mountaintop, which makes shelf-stable drinks. While that deal fell through, Apollo and the Beverly Hills-based mid-market PE manager built a rapport that eventually led to the CV transaction.

"It's definitely on the smaller side," Stein said of Apollo's investment. "But I think they see the opportunity we do, which is it's just very hard to find an entry point and it's a very attractive space...The potential upside got them so excited that they were willing to write a smaller check than they might otherwise write."

Few people are trained on the processing technology used by Mountaintop, making it even harder to find a strong management team in this space, Stein said. Monogram spent two years looking to buy an incumbent, but ultimately decided to build the platform from scratch. It assembled a management team and asked the team to secure long-term contracts with blue-chip customers before committing capital to build out manufacturing capacity.

Existing investors were given the option to roll over their investments or take liquidity, and the majority cashed out.

Mountaintop Beverage is a portfolio company held by Monogram's second flagship fund, a 2022 vintage that raised $250 million and has fully deployed its capital. The Morgantown, WV-based beverage manufacturer uses low-acid aseptic processing—a specialized technique that extends beverage shelf life without adding preservatives or refrigeration—to produce drinks that supply brands across the coffee, dairy, tea, protein and plant-based milk categories.

The company needs additional capex to expand manufacturing capacity amid strong growth. That process, according to Stein, could take at least two to three years, a mismatch for a fund that is at the end of its investment period. Monogram decided to roll the asset into a continuation vehicle, which will provide the capital expected to expand the company's 330,000-square-foot footprint to nearly 600,000 square feet.

"Anytime we stood up a new line, we had a line of customers that were waiting to contract a significant volume against it to the point where our existing footprint is now entirely sold out, which is necessitating the expansion," Stein said.

Monogram manages just under $2 billion in assets, according to Stein. The firm typically writes checks of about $75 million per transaction, though that can climb to $150 million with co-investments. It targets companies generating around $30 million in EBITDA, with a strategy of serving as the first institutional capital into these businesses and exiting at a much larger scale—though the target range flexes down to $5 million in EBITDA for the smallest deals.

Houlihan Lokey, Proskauer Rose and Massumi + Consoli advised Monogram on the continuation vehicle, and Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP served as legal counsel to Apollo S3.

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This article originally appeared on PitchBook News