Pine Brook, an investment firm focused on building businesses in the energy and financial services sectors, announced a $100 million line of equity investment in Cahill Services LLC. Headquartered in Houston, Cahill will provide specialty rental services to customers in the oil and gas, refining, industrial, petrochemicals, utilities and related industries where a high level of technical knowledge of the business and customer needs is required.
Cahill’s management team is focused on acquiring existing specialty rental services companies, and integrating them into a unified platform for growth. The company is actively evaluating a number of potential acquisitions.
Cahill is led by an experienced management team, led by CEO George Walker, who worked for international specialty rental company Aggreko. Walker, Cahill Services CEO, most recently served as president of the North America region for Aggreko and was executive director of Aggreko’s board.
Joining Walker are industry veterans Derek Foster, who will be Cahill’s chief financial officer, and Keith Sanner, vice president of business development. Foster also worked at Aggreko, most recently as senior vice president of finance for Aggreko Americas where he oversaw the finance and M&A activities for the region. Sanner worked at Aggreko for more than 25 years, and has more than 32 years of experience in the industrial services and maritime sectors.
“We’re very excited to partner with George and his team to leverage their extensive experience to build a strong specialty rental business,” said Rich Aube, managing director and head of Pine Brook’s energy investment team. “Our strong experience building services businesses to scale in order to serve the needs of customers operating nationwide makes us a great partner for Cahill.”
“Pine Brook’s deep roots in the energy sector, coupled with the firm’s sophisticated understanding of the financial services and lending markets bring us a unique set of intellectual capital as we execute our business plan,” added Walker.
Last year, Pine Brook closed its second fund, Pine Brook Capital Partners II LP, with total capital commitments of $2.43 billion, also targeting investments in the financial services and energy sectors. Pine Brook typically finances these businesses with equity rather than debt and uses a line of equity funding structure in which a multi-year business plan is matched with a long-term capital arrangement.
