Suma Kulkarni

Suma Kulkarni is a Managing Partner at ACON Investments, a Washington, D.C.-based private equity firm founded in 1996 that invests across the United States, Latin America, and Southern Europe, with additional offices in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, and Spain. She joined ACON in 2008 and has spent more than a decade and a half at the firm, rising to Managing Partner and becoming one of its most senior investment professionals.

Before ACON, Kulkarni was a Senior Associate in the Technology, Media & Telecommunications Investment Banking Group at Friedman Billings Ramsey (FBR), where she focused on the business services and financial technology sectors and was responsible for executing the firm's underwriting and M&A advisory activities. She holds a B.S. in Finance from the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park.

At ACON, Kulkarni sits on the boards of numerous portfolio companies. Current and recent board roles include Atlantic Sustainable Catch, Beauty by Imagination, New Era, Novipax, SUZOHAPP/PayComplete, and True Religion. She has previously served on the boards of former ACON portfolio companies including Fiesta Mart, Igloo Products, Goody Products, and Northern Tier Energy. She has been recognized as a leading dealmaker — named to the Global M&A Network's "Top U.S.A. Women Dealmakers" list (2019) and profiled in Buyouts Insider's "Women in Private Equity: The Class of 2023." Within ACON she has been a visible advocate for diversity, and the firm reports that roughly 71% of its U.S. workforce identifies as women or ethnic minorities.

• "There are a lot of good businesses that are misunderstood." — Kulkarni's stated approach (PE Hub, Jan 2025) is to look past negative headlines or troubled histories to find fundamentally sound companies that the market has mispriced.
• Focuses on control investments in established middle-market companies — buyouts, corporate carve-outs, and recapitalizations — rather than early-stage or venture bets.
• Strong track record in complex carve-outs with creative financing: she led a carve-out of a refining operation from Marathon Petroleum during the recession that exited via "the first-ever variable rate MLP."
• Deep concentration in consumer, retail, and branded-products deals (True Religion, Igloo, New Era, Beauty by Imagination, Goody), alongside business services, fintech, packaging, and energy.
• Values operational repositioning and brand turnaround potential — betting on omni-channel consumer brands with durable customer relationships that can be revitalized under new ownership.