John Kim

John Kim is a Senior Principal and Partner at New State Capital Partners, a lower-middle-market private equity firm founded in 2013 and headquartered in New Rochelle, New York. He joined the firm at its inception in 2013 and is one of its long-tenured investment leaders, focused on sourcing, structuring, and executing transactions across the firm's core services and industrials sectors.

Before New State, Kim spent more than 14 years in investment banking. Most recently he was an Executive Director in the Financial Sponsors & Leveraged Finance Group at UBS Investment Bank, where he originated and executed leveraged buyouts, recapitalizations, and refinancings, and co-covered middle-market private equity firms. Earlier he worked at Credit Suisse First Boston (formerly Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette) in the Private Placements Group, where he helped raise over $2 billion for growth companies across a range of industries. He began his career at Deutsche Bank in the Commercial Real Estate Finance Group.

Kim earned a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of Chicago. He has been an early and active participant in the independent-sponsor market, building long-standing relationships with sponsors — a theme that resurfaced in the firm's 2026 launch of its dedicated non-control strategy, Forge Select, which he publicly championed.

• Stage & structure: Control buyouts plus flexible non-control capital — preferred equity, minority equity, structured equity, restructurings ("good company / bad balance sheet"), and long-dated, family-office-style investments.
• Size: Equity checks of roughly $10–100M, targeting companies with ~$8–40M EBITDA and $25–250M enterprise value.
• Sectors: Concentrated in business, financial, professional, and industrial services (aerospace/defense, commercial & facility services, tech-enabled/BPO services, financial services & fintech, IT services, staffing, transportation & logistics, environmental/waste services).
• What makes them say yes: New State frames itself as relationship-driven rather than criteria-driven — "We approach each potential investment as an opportunity to create a long lasting and valuable relationship, not as an exercise in meeting rigid investing criteria." The firm favors "great services companies with great people" and industrial businesses with embedded value, high margins, and strong customer-service delivery.
• Independent-sponsor orientation: Kim has been active with independent sponsors since the firm's early days (six completed transactions) and sees "exponential market growth" in the non-control segment — the thesis behind the 2026 Forge Select launch.