J.H. Whitney & Company
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| Limited liability company | |
| Industry | Private Equity |
| Founded | 1946 |
| Headquarters | New Canaan, Connecticut, United States |
| Products | Investments, private equity funds |
| Website | www.whitney.com |
J.H. Whitney & Company is a venture capital firm in the U.S., founded in 1946 by John Hay Whitney and his partner Benno Schmidt. Today the firm focuses primarily on leveraged buyouts, turnarounds, acquisitions, and recapitalizations of more mature companies particularly those it considers to be in the middle market. The firm is based in New Canaan, Connecticut.
The firm, which today is known as Whitney & Co. continues to make investments in leveraged buyout transactions and raised $750 million for its sixth institutional private equity fund in 2005. The $750 million raised in 2005 was a significant decrease from its previous funds, when the firm raised $1.1 billion in 2001 and $975 million in 2000 for Whitney V and IV, respectively. The performance of the 2000 vintage fund IV in particular was impacted by the firm's exposure to technology and internet businesses.
J.H. Whitney & Company was founded by John Hay Whitney who put up $10 million after World War II to finance entrepreneurs with business plans who were unwelcome at banks. Mr. Whitney brought in Benno Schmidt as his partner to run the company. When starting the company, Whitney wanted a broad team of young experts to be his deputies. He went to the deans of Harvard Business School, Yale Law School, and the MIT Graduate School of Engineering and asked each man who the best student they produced in the past five years was. The HBS dean cleverly responded that he was insulted that Whitney would think that he would simply rank his best students and hand the list out, but that if he was to do such an outrageous thing, he would rank C. Wrede Petersmeyer, a graduate the previous year, first. Whitney hired Petersmeyer the next day, and Petersmeyer went on to become a partner at the firm and run Whitney Communications. Whitney had been investing since the 1930s, founding Pioneer Pictures in 1933 and acquiring a 15% interest in Technicolor Corporation with his cousin Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney. It was not until after World War II that what is considered today to be true private equity investments began to emerge marked by the founding of the first two venture capital firms in 1946: American Research and Development Corporation. (ARDC) and J.H. Whitney & Company.
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