Chris Calabrese has increased his involvement with Star Mountain Capital from an operating partner to a full-time role of strategic portfolio partner. Star Mountain senior advisors and operating partners are aligned with Star Mountain’s full-time team and investors by investing their personal capital and sharing in the firm’s carried interest.
“We are excited to expand Chris into this full-time role providing additional value for our investors, portfolio companies and team,” Brett Hickey, founder and CEO of Star Mountain Capital, said. “His 30-plus years of lower middle-market private credit, risk and portfolio management, as well as overall investment experience will be a great addition to our team.”
“Over the past dozen years, Star Mountain has built an impressive team and investment process tailored to the large and fragmented lower middle-market,” Calabrese said. “I am pleased to be leveraging my experience to further improve best practices across all areas of the firm and particularly within portfolio management.”
Calabrese will be based in the firm’s Philadelphia office, which is one of Star Mountain’s 11 offices nationwide.
In 2005 Calabrese co-founded LBC Credit Partners, a lower middle-market private credit investment firm that was acquired by CIFC Asset Management in December 2021. At LBC, he served as a senior partner facilitating a team which invested over $5.5 billion in more than 200 lower middle-market companies through 2019. During that time, Calabrese was an investment committee member and had oversight of the credit, portfolio management and capital markets efforts including a unit that directly managed all active portfolio accounts where he was also involved in complex restructurings and divestitures.
Prior to LBC Credit Partners, Calabrese was a managing director at Wachovia (now part of Wells Fargo) where he was head of business development and underwriting as well as member of senior credit committee.
Earlier in his career, Calabrese was a senior vice president at First Union Bank (now part of Wells Fargo) where he led a team of commercial loan originators, underwriters and portfolio managers for leveraged loan products including asset-based lending. Prior to First Union Bank he was a vice president at Meridian Bank. Calabrese obtained formal credit training in banking and corporate finance at Mellon Bank where he started his career in 1986.
