Most large private equity shops pride themselves on flexibility. They’ll write a check in healthcare one quarter and consumer goods the next, adjusting based on where deal flow looks most attractive at any given moment. JP Conte’s career has been built around a different premise: that deep, repeated study of a small number of industries produces better results than breadth.
Managing partner of a San Francisco middle-market private equity firm and founder of Lupine Crest Capital, Conte has spent roughly three decades concentrating his investment activity across four sectors: healthcare, financial services, software, and industrial technology. A July 2026 piece published by Dataconomy examined his reasoning for that approach and why industrial technology holds its place alongside three sectors that might seem more intuitive to Wall Street observers.
The argument for concentration is partly about conviction speed. When a generalist fund encounters a factory-analytics company, an investment case has to be built from scratch: market maps assembled, customer types identified, competitive dynamics benchmarked. That process takes time, and time spent in diligence is time the deal can fall apart. A firm that’s spent years inside industrial technology already knows which niches carry pricing advantage, which businesses face customer concentration risk, and which management teams have actually executed.
The industrial technology category sits at a convergence point. It’s been described by JP Conte as an area where software economics meet physical-world demand from manufacturers. Businesses that provide plant-scheduling software, equipment-monitoring subscriptions, or quality-inspection systems carry renewal rates and margins more typical of software companies than manufacturers. Their customers, however, operate expensive, long-lived facilities where switching vendors is genuinely disruptive. That combination is what gets sought out when sector concentration provides the pattern recognition to find it quickly and evaluate it accurately.