Ara Partners has appointed Masumi Waida as Chief Financial Officer, recruiting a finance chief from the middle market private equity firm ACON Investments to run the finance function of a decarbonisation investor now managing roughly 10.6 billion dollars. The appointment was announced on 29 September 2026.
Founded in 2017, Ara Partners is a private equity and infrastructure investment firm that buys and builds middle market businesses and physical assets which cut emissions from industrial activity. It invests across three strategies, Private Equity, Infrastructure and Energy, and reported approximately 10.6 billion dollars of assets under management as of 30 June 2026. The firm is headquartered in Houston, Texas, with further offices in Boston, Dublin and Washington DC.
Waida will lead corporate and fund finance, accounting, tax, financial reporting and treasury, and will oversee continued development of the firm's finance and operations infrastructure. He brings more than 20 years of experience in investment management. He joins from ACON Investments, where he was Chief Financial Officer, a role he took up in 2019. Before that he was Managing Director and Chief Financial Officer of the Mount Kellett Funds at Fortress Investment Group, and earlier a Vice President at Lehman Brothers, where his responsibilities included oversight of private equity and hedge fund products.
He holds a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Alberta and is a Chartered Professional Accountant and Chartered Accountant through the Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada.
Troy Thacker, Managing Partner at Ara Partners, tied the hire to the firm's growth rather than to a remediation. "Masumi has built and led finance functions at global investment firms through periods of significant growth, and that experience will serve Ara and our investors well," he said. "As we continue to scale our platform, his discipline and depth make him exactly the right person to lead our finance organization."
Waida framed the role as an infrastructure build. "Ara has built a differentiated platform in an area of the market where capital is genuinely needed," he said. "I'm looking forward to building the infrastructure to support the firm's next phase of growth."
The appointment reflects a specific pressure on managers of Ara's size and vintage. A firm running three strategies across four offices and more than 10 billion dollars faces fund finance, valuation and investor reporting demands that are closer to those of a large institution than of a growth stage sponsor, and limited partners increasingly diligence the finance and operations function directly. Hiring a chief financial officer whose last role was at a comparable middle market sponsor, rather than promoting internally, is the conventional answer when the requirement is institutional process rather than sector knowledge.
There is a second dimension in decarbonisation investing specifically. Industrial assets bought for their emissions profile carry measurement and reporting obligations that flow through to fund level disclosure, so the finance function sits closer to the investment case than it would at a generalist firm. Waida's remit explicitly covers the reporting infrastructure that this requires.
