Women in PE, class of 2023: Nishita Cummings

Her dealmaking prowess is considerable. Since joining the firm in 2007, she has been a key player in many of the 43 platform investments and 22 exits completed by the Kayne Partners team.

Nishita Cummings is known by her colleagues at Kayne Partners as a “proactive leader and critical driver of the firm’s strategic growth.”

Her job title is a mouthful, but it reflects the range of roles she plays at the Los Angeles firm. She is a managing partner, co-head and co-portfolio manager of Kayne Partners, the growth private equity group at Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors. She serves on Kayne Partners investment committee, as well as on Kayne’s board of directors.

Her contributions to Kayne Partners are many. She has helped refine the firm’s proprietary sourcing strategy, including expanding into Canada. She has identified significant investment themes, such as supply chain technology. And she has driven value creation at portfolio companies, including overseeing 10 exits over the past year.

“We continue to be very bullish on this sector. Supply chains are not going anywhere, and the companies we invest in are applying well-established playbooks to a massive sector that has been slow to adopt modern best practices”

Her dealmaking prowess is considerable. Since joining the firm in 2007, she has been a key player in many of the 43 platform investments and 22 exits completed by the Kayne Partners team across five funds and five co-investment vehicles.

Cummings spearheaded Kayne Partners’ supply chain technology thesis, which has resulted in investments in 14 companies over the last decade. They include: KlearNow, (a customs clearance technology provider), FreightWaves (a provider of supply chain research and intelligence), DriveWyze (a transportation tracking technology software provider sold to Sageview Capital) and DiCentral (an e-commerce payments processor sold to TrueCommerce).

“Supply chain technology has all the ingredients that we look for in a sector – significant headroom for technological adoption, complex end-user requirements that warrant the use of technology, and strong secular growth within a dynamic and rapidly changing environment,” Cummings tells Buyouts.

“The origin of our thesis began in 2012 when we saw these key drivers combined with regulatory change and federal mandates for technology adoption in transportation; consumer behavior transitioning to on-demand availability of goods and services, and inefficiencies in supply chains to catch up with these expectations.”

Supply chain tech deals show no signs of slowing down. “The effects of the pandemic increased awareness of the issues within supply chain, and these concerns continue to be impactful in how broader supply chains operate,” she says.

“We continue to be very bullish on this sector. Supply chains are not going anywhere, and the companies we invest in are applying well-established playbooks to a massive sector that has been slow to adopt modern best practices.”

In her role as co-portfolio manager, Cummings has set her sights on value creation, now more than ever.

“A lot of firms talk about partnership, but we take this very seriously, we are proud that we are always willing to roll up our sleeves in challenging times like this, and the fact that this approach is successful not only for our portfolio companies, but manifests in returns for our limited partners as well.”