Uplift Investors, a Darien, Connecticut-based private equity firm focused on services investing, has closed its inaugural fund with $670 million in capital commitments at its hard cap. The firm was founded in March 2025 by Will Hausberg, Doug Rosenstein, and Brad Skaf, three partners who have invested together on every deal for the past decade. Capital came from a diversified base of limited partners including pensions, endowments, foundations, insurance companies, and family offices.
Uplift is built around what it calls a business model-centric investment philosophy — the view that understanding how a company creates and captures value through its underlying business model is more predictive than sector expertise alone. The firm has codified this into a proprietary 5-5-5 Framework that targets companies at the intersection of five scalable business models (dual-sided networks, functional outsourcing, professional services, route-based services, and information services), five services sectors (knowledge and talent solutions, legal services, technical trades, financial services, and industrial services), and five Value Creation Centers (organizational design, go-to-market excellence, talent acquisition, technology and AI enablement, and M&A and integration).
Fund I has already deployed capital into two investments that illustrate how the framework operates across different business models within the same sector. Uplift formed Orion Legal MSO, a managed service organization supporting plaintiff law firms, and separately acquired IMS Legal Strategies, a global provider of expert witness, litigation consulting, and jury research services. Both sit within legal services, but Uplift describes them as representing distinct business models that require different diligence frameworks, operating strategies, and value creation approaches — a distinction the firm argues traditional sector-based private equity would obscure.
KEY QUOTES:
“Over the past decade, we’ve learned that understanding a business model tells you more about how a company creates value than understanding an industry alone. That insight led us to reengineer the traditional private equity value creation playbook and build Uplift around a business model-centric investment philosophy. Uplift gave us the opportunity to create a purpose-built investment firm with the team, infrastructure, and processes intentionally designed around that philosophy. We are grateful for the confidence our investors have placed in us and excited to partner with exceptional management teams for years to come.”
Will Hausberg, Doug Rosenstein, and Brad Skaf, Co-Founders and Managing Partners, Uplift Investors
