Truelink Acquires 120-Year-Old Industrial Maintenance Specialist JT Thorpe

Truelink Capital has agreed to acquire JT Thorpe Group, a provider of specialty maintenance services that keep industrial furnaces, boilers, and other high-heat equipment running, from H.I.G. Capital.

JT Thorpe installs, repairs, and maintains the heat-resistant materials and protective systems that line the inside of industrial equipment operating at extreme temperatures. Its core work is refractory services — the specialized brick, castable, and ceramic linings that allow furnaces, boilers, kilns, and reactors to contain heat without failing — alongside fireproofing and insulation that protect structures and piping.

The company also provides asset integrity services such as scaffolding, access, and mechanical work that support the maintenance and turnaround of complex plants, making it a single source for the recurring upkeep that industrial facilities cannot safely defer.

Because the linings inside high-temperature equipment degrade with use, JT Thorpe’s services are consumed on a recurring basis through scheduled maintenance, emergency repairs, and periodic plant shutdowns known as turnarounds. The company operates through a family of businesses that includes JT Thorpe & Son, JT Thorpe Industrial, K&G Industrial Services, Brahma Group, ThorCan and Jayne Industries, and fields its crews from a network of more than 30 locations across North America.Customers of JT Thorpe are active in the power generation, semiconductor manufacturing, liquefied natural gas, mining, steel, cement, and other infrastructure and industrial end markets.

H.I.G. Capital acquired JT Thorpe Group (then Terra Millennium) in 2022 from Court Square Capital Partners which first invested in the company in 2016. Terra Millennium was formed in 1987 as a holding company for J.T. Thorpe & Son (JTT), one of the oldest refractory contractors in the United States. JTT was founded in 1906 in San Francisco to support the rebuilding efforts following the Great San Francisco Earthquake. In 2002, the costs of asbestos litigation forced Terra Millennium to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and create a trust fund to handle future asbestos claims.

Operating as JT Thorpe Group, the business expanded during H.I.G.’s ownership through add-on acquisitions, including entry into the Canadian refractory market with the purchase of ThorCan, the acquisition of Reftech International, and the 2024 additions of Thermal Solutions and Structsure Scaffold Solutions, which broadened its thermal and access-services capabilities.

Today, Salt Lake City-headquartered JT Thorpe is led by CEO Kevin Howard who is retaining a significant ownership stake in the company in partnership with Truelink Capital.

“We look forward to partnering with Truelink and continuing to meet and exceed our customers’ expectations,” said Mr. Howard. “Truelink’s operational focus and experience partnering with businesses in the infrastructure and industrial services space make them the right partner as we continue to invest in our people, our safety culture, and our ability to serve customers across North America. Our team has spent 120 years building this business, and I’m excited for Truelink to help us write its next chapter.”

“JT Thorpe has built a durable maintenance business anchored by long-standing customer relationships and recurring, mission-critical services,” said Luke Myers, a co-founder and managing partner at Truelink Capital. “JT Thorpe also sits at the intersection of strong growth tailwinds in infrastructure end markets right now, from LNG and semiconductor to data centers and power generation. We see significant opportunity to build on its existing foundation, both organically and through a pipeline of strategic M&A, and look forward to partnering with Kevin Howard and the entire JT Thorpe team.”

Industrial maintenance work of this kind rides on the same construction wave now reshaping American heavy industry. Spending on liquefied natural gas export terminals, semiconductor fabrication plants, data centers, and power generation is expanding the installed base of high-temperature equipment that must be lined, insulated, and periodically rebuilt. The global market for refractory materials is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of roughly 5.4 percent through 2030, according to Technavio, while the US thermal management market is forecast to approach $7 billion by 2035, according to Market Research Future. Because refractory linings and fireproofing wear out on a predictable schedule regardless of the economic cycle, demand for the maintenance and turnaround services that restore them tends to recur, and the field remains fragmented across regional specialists, leaving room for consolidation.

Truelink Capital is a Los Angeles-based private equity firm founded in 2022 by Todd Golditch and Luke Meyers, both former managing directors at Platinum Equity, that invests across the industrials and tech-enabled services sectors. In March 2026, the firm closed its oversubscribed Fund II at a $2.0 billion hard cap — above a $1.5 billion target and raised in under three months — more than double its $950 million Fund I.

The buy of JT Thorpe is the third platform investment for Truelink’s second fund and follows the acquisitions last month of Lyons Magnus, a formulator of specialty ingredients, beverage bases, and healthcare nutrition products for foodservice customers, from Paine Schwartz Partners; and Horwitz, a provider of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) services to commercial and industrial facilities, from Svoboda Capital Partners.

Goldman Sachs and Harris Williams are the financial advisors to JT Thorpe on this transaction.

The sale of JT Thorpe to Truelink is expected to close by the end of the third quarter of 2026.