Monogram Capital Partners Closes Apollo S3-Led Continuation Vehicle for Mountaintop Beverage

Monogram Capital Partners has closed a single-asset continuation vehicle for Mountaintop Beverage, transferring the company from Fund II into a newly formed vehicle. Apollo S3, the sponsor and secondary solutions business of Apollo Global Management (NYSE: APO ), led the continuation vehicle, with participation from Partners Capital, TIFF, and H7 Capital, among other institutional investors. The transaction returns a significant majority of Monogram Capital Partners' Fund II capital to investors while Monogram Capital Partners and Mountaintop Beverage's management team retain ownership of the company. Mountaintop Beverage's management team, board, and operating strategy remain unchanged following the transaction, with Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Sokal continuing to lead the company. The continuation vehicle provides committed capital for a 250,000-square-foot capacity addition that will bring Mountaintop Beverage's Morgantown, West Virgin manufacturing campus to nearly 600,000 square feet. Monogram Capital Partners ("Monogram"), a Los Angeles-based private equity firm investing in family-held and founder-led consumer and service businesses, today announced the closing of a single-asset continuation vehicle for Mountaintop Beverage ("Mountaintop" or the "Company"), a scaled manufacturer of low-acid aseptic and extended-shelf-life (ESL) beverages headquartered in Morgantown, West Virginia. The transaction transfers Mountaintop from Fund II into a newly formed continuation vehicle led by Apollo S3, Apollo's sponsor and secondary solutions business. Partners Capital, TIFF, and H7 Capital also participated in the transaction, alongside other institutional investors. The vehicle delivers significant liquidity to investors while positioning Monogram and Mountaintop's management team to retain substantial exposure to the Company's next phase of growth. The vehicle also provides Mountaintop with committed capital and an extended investment horizon to fund its expansion program, including a 250,000-square-foot capacity addition that will bring the Company's Morgantown, West Virginia, campus to nearly 600,000 square feet, as well as future acquisitions. Monogram first invested in Mountaintop in August 2021, partnering with the Company's seasoned founding team to build a state-of-the-art low-acid aseptic manufacturing platform in Morgantown, West Virginia. Over the ensuing five years, Monogram has supported the Company's buildout of numerous high-speed low-acid aseptic and ESL beverage processing lines, establishing Mountaintop as a critical manufacturing partner to leading strategics and functional beverage brands of scale in the protein, coffee, dairy, plant-based milk alternatives, and tea categories. "Mountaintop represents precisely the kind of business we seek to back – a technically complex, capacity constrained supply chain partner providing essential services to some of the fastest-growing brands in the consumer space. We believe the flywheel between category-leading consumer brands and the supply chain and service businesses that power them is where the most differentiated, proprietary opportunities are found, and Mountaintop is a powerful embodiment of that thesis," said Jared Stein, Co-Founder and Partner at Monogram Capital Partners. "Demand for PET bottles and high-protein, functional beverages continues to outpace the industry's constrained ability to produce them given the highly technical training required to do so, and low-acid aseptic processing is one of the hardest processes in beverage manufacturing to scale. Mountaintop has develope...