INVESTMENT
2025 Year-in-Review
2025 reinforced that corporate sellers are increasingly pursuing the divesting of non-core divisions or underinvested business units. Supply-chain volatility, tariff uncertainty, rapidly evolving customer acquisition dynamics, and continued pressure on labor markets are contributing to a surge in carve-outs and divestiture activity across the mid-market. CriticalPoint’s Investment team spent the year focused on solving complex operational challenges that emerge when business units and divisions are divested after corporate sellers deem them outside of their core strategy.
As investors, we continued to lean into situations where strong brands or strategically valuable assets have suffered from under-investment, leadership turnover, or sub-optimal operations. These circumstances were particularly common among subsidiaries of large enterprises, where internal capital allocation cycles and shifting priorities often left high-potential businesses stagnant.
The team completed the Bizhaven add-on acquisition for WorkWise Compliance, an important validation of a core value-creation strategy for our Private Capital practice. Add-ons remain central to our portfolio philosophy; they accelerate scale, expand product and service breadth, and materially increase enterprise value when executed with discipline. WorkWise and Bizhaven now begin 2026 together as a more comprehensive HR and compliance platform with a clearer long-term strategic trajectory.
Across the portfolio, 2025 was also a transformative year in productivity and modernization. We drove improvements in customer support, demand generation, and operational scalability, deliberately emphasizing productivity and embracing AI led tools—while maintaining the relational, people-first brand that defines CriticalPoint’s approach.
Private Credit
In 2025, the private credit market was marked by competition, compression, and “mandate drift”. The market continued to grapple with the downstream effects of prolonged deal-flow scarcity. After some recent years of subdued transaction activity, expectations for a meaningful rebound once again increased. While deal momentum began to improve modestly in late summer, the overall year appeared to reinforce a defining dynamic: too much capital pursuing too few opportunities.
