For four generations, the Saliba family has been in the business of building in Los Angeles.
The story begins with Naseeb Michael Saliba, an enterprising Lebanese immigrant who, after moving to L.A., joined forces with a pair of uncles to work in construction. It continues, in a manner of speaking, with his name – in the form of NMS Capital Group, a private equity firm in Beverly Hills helmed by grandson Trevor Saliba.
Trevor has been building his firm – and preserving his grandfather’s legacy and name – in a different way. Through joint ventures, acquisitions, and other deals, NMS Capital is helping grow companies with capital injections and access to resources that often prove vital to the startup market.
“We tend to focus on financial services, specifically insurance or reinsurance,” Saliba said in a recent interview. “We also have a focus on energy and infrastructure, and we’ve just pivoted recently into construction and engineering, and we do some real estate.”
Formed in 2010 as a family office, NMS Capital manages more than $5.7 billion in assets. In a market with giants such as Clearlake Capital Group, Leonard Green & Partners, and Platinum Equity, NMS Capital stands square in the middle of the pack – ranked at No. 14 in the Los Angeles Business Journal’s top 30 private equity firms by AUM.
Given L.A.’s identity as a middle market economy, that’s not a bad place to be.
Its dealmaking in recent years was certainly enough to capture the Business Journal’s attention at its inaugural Mergers & Acquisitions Awards in September, where Saliba won “Private Equity Professional of the Year.”
“On the global macro level, we’re a small firm compared to your major players,” Saliba said, “but I would say that we would define ourselves as what I would refer to as the ‘lower middle market,’ which is really companies and target sizes sub-$500 million.”
Saliba was drawn to investment banking early in adulthood, even though he grew up in a construction family. Naseeb Michael would form N.M. Saliba Co., which later merged to create Tutor Saliba Corp., as the predecessor to Sylmar construction giant Tutor Perini Corp.
This is how he “accidentally,” as he puts it, fell into private equity. As he grew his investment and growth business, Saliba developed a management wing of NMS and found himself taking on more construction management jobs. He took on so much that, in November, he spun off Saliba Group Inc., with up to $10 million in startup cash from NMS Capital and a goal of landing about $500 million in management contracts to start.
Still, the deals are alluring. Saliba noted that his favorite part of dealmaking is the novelty of each agreement. “There is no identical transaction,” he said.
In the U.S., NMS in recent years led a $50 million investment in a newly launched specialty collateral reinsurance firm. It also deployed about $650 million toward digital infrastructure projected nationwide. Most recently, NMS acquired Get Cover Technologies, the Beverly Hills-based warranty and service tech firm.
NMS Capital’s reach goes beyond L.A. as well.
The firm holds a significant investment in a Swiss holding company that operates in insurance, energy, and financial services. Its most recent $300 million investment brings that company’s value to $2.5 billion. NMS also invests in a specialized metals joint venture valued at $150 million with a Turkish industrial conglomerate.
Broadly across the market, Saliba thinks 2026 could go gangbusters in terms of deals and M&A activity.
“I think we’re in a very interesting time in the sense that there’s a lot of capital on the sidelines ready to be deployed into whatever the respective firms target sectors are,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve ever seen a time like this, where there’s been so much available capital ready to go, so to speak.”
Saliba said there’s no secret sauce for the year’s investment target. Whether that capital and those acquisitions are successfully deployed, it will ultimately boil down to discipline and execution, he added.
“Every PE firm, they have what they focus on, and usually that tends to be where they have developed some level of expertise by sector,” Saliba said. “I think that any successful investor is going to implement proper diligence, proper analytics.”
Several private equity deals made headlines in L.A. in 2025.
The most notable of which was 3G Capital’s acquisition of Manhattan Beach-based footwear manufacturer Skechers U.S.A., resulting in L.A. losing one of its few Fortune 500 companies in a deal valued at $9 billion. Menlo Park-based Silver Lake closed on its take-private deal of Beverly Hills-based Endeavor Group Holdings Inc. in March.
Other L.A. take-private deals not strictly involving private equity include TrueCar Inc., Guess Inc. and Air Lease Corp.
Saliba said he wasn’t sure whether any specific market winds were guiding take-private deals beyond simply adjusting to individual economics.
“It’s interesting. There’s a lot of things that usually drive take-private deals,” he said. “It could be that the company doesn’t want to deal with the nuances of being public. The company is kicking off a lot of cash flow, so there’s no need to be public.
“But I’ll tell you,” Saliba continued, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you see, in a couple of years, those same companies flip and go public again. They’ll come in and restructure. I think things are cyclical. I’m not saying it will happen, but if it does, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
Zane Hill
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