$31B Investor on AI Infrastructure, Private Equity, and Secondaries
Stuart Waugh, Managing Partner of Northleaf Capital Partners, joins David Weisburd to discuss how the AI boom is creating an unprecedented bottleneck in power and physical infrastructure. Waugh explains Northleaf's thesis on the $40 trillion addressable infrastructure market, the structural advantages of mid-market private equity and private credit, the evolution of the secondaries market into a strategic rebalancing tool, and the organizational lessons learned scaling Northleaf from a five-person team to managing $31 billion in assets.
- Retail Business Development Companies (BDCs) face headlines about redemption pressure and shifting sentiment, but Waugh notes BDCs represent only a small fraction of the wider private credit market. Read →
- Secondaries have shifted from distressed fire-sale venues to standard portfolio management tools for institutional CIOs rebalancing liquid allocations. Read →
- Northleaf Capital Partners grew from a five-person team spinning out of TD Bank in 2009 to a multi-asset manager overseeing $31 billion across private equity, private credit, and infrastructure. Read →
- Stuart Waugh calculates a $40 trillion addressable infrastructure funding gap over the next decade as digital compute demands outstrip physical utility capacity. Read →