MiddleGround Capital

At MiddleGround Capital, we believe the businesses we own can operate responsibly and perform well together, and that one doesn’t have to come at the expense of the other. Our 2026 Sustainability Report reflects that.

MiddleGround earned a five-star score from the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) in its Direct – Private Equity module in 2025 and maintained its Article 8 classification under the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR). Our team was also recognized as a Best Place to Work in Private Equity by Mergers & Acquisitions, a Great Place to Work for the third consecutive year, and a Best Place to Work in Kentucky for the sixth consecutive year running.

READ THE FULL REPORT

In this report, we cover shop floor safety, investing in our people, responsible ownership across a full lifecycle, and environmental progress across the portfolio.

How MiddleGround is Improving Shop Floor Safety Across the Portfolio

Safety Program

In 2025, we rolled out a standardized safety program across the portfolio that focused on the six incident types most likely to cause serious injury on a manufacturing floor: getting caught in machinery, struck by a falling object, contact with an industrial vehicle, falls from height, electrical shock, and exposure to extreme heat or chemicals. Our goal is to lower serious injury rates by sharpening hazard recognition and reinforcing safe behaviors on the floor.

Measuring Safety Progress

Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) is the industry standard for measuring workplace safety, and it’s how we track progress portfolio-wide. In 2025, several portfolio companies posted improvement year over year and across a full hold period:

• Arrow Tru-Line: ~62% reduction over its hold period (5.85 at acquisition to 2.24 at exit)
• Lindsay Precast: 2025 had the strongest year-end result under our ownership (8.13 at acquisition to 3.67 at exit)
• Alco Manufacturing: approximately 40% year-over-year improvement in 2025, below its internal target and the relevant BLS industry benchmark
• Race Winning Brands: 50% year-over-year improvement in 2025, approximately 76% below its industry benchmark

Raising Wages Across Our Portfolio

Wage progress was a theme across our portfolio this year, and at several companies, it coincided with lower turnover. We attribute that improvement to a combination of initiatives beyond wages, including engagement programs, revised interview and retention processes, and improved benefits.

Wage progress across the portfolio

• Lindsay Precast: $24.36 to $34.00 per hour over its hold period, a 39.6% increase
• Arrow Tru-Line: 18.6% average wage increase; zero employees earning below $15 per hour at exit
• SixAxis: minimum wage increased from $14 to $21 per hour
• Vytl Controls Group: share of employees earning above $25 per hour (or the international equivalent) grew from roughly 70% to 86%

How we Invest in ESG Across an Investment’s Full Lifecycle: Responsible Ownership at Exit

Some examples of sustained investment come from portfolio companies we’ve owned start to finish. Here’s what that looked like across the three closures we signed in 2025:

Vytl Controls Group

• 5 million consecutive work hours without a lost-time incident at Setpoint Integrated Solutions
• ISO 14001 program built from scratch to 7 certified locations
• Turnover held at roughly half the relevant industry benchmark

Lindsay Precast

• Diversity gains across both gender and race over the hold period
• 39.1% of concrete poured across its facilities used CarbonCure technology by mid-2025

Arrow Tru-Line

• An estimated $240,000 in savings from a renegotiated electricity contract at its Archbold, Ohio facility over a three-year term
• Archbold facility transitioned to 100% renewable electricity supply via Renewable Energy Certificates
• 17% reduction in average monthly landfill waste over an 18-month measurement period

Environmental Progress Across MiddleGround’s Portfolio

We added three more portfolio companies to our Gravity Climate partnership, and we’re now tracking more than 35 identified projects across that work, from lighting retrofits to waste heat recovery

Facility-Level Results

• Stemmer Imaging: new headquarters became the first LEED Gold certified building in our portfolio’s history, verified through the U.S. Green Building Council’s third-party certification process
• Xtrac: progress toward FIA 3-Star Environmental Accreditation, its highest tier (certification process remained in progress as of year-end), plus 22 new EV charging stations at its UK facility
• A.M. Castle & Co.: identified more than 30 energy projects with Gravity Climate projected to generate a combined $367,000 in annual savings once implemented; as of year-end, most projects were still in progress
• Attala Steel: 36% year-over-year reduction in water consumption per ton through improved process controls at its Kosciusko facility

Our Future Plans for ESG

Our focus now is on building on the momentum. We’ll keep tracking KPIs across the portfolio and refining the 5-year sustainability plans we build with each portfolio company, so progress compounds rather than resets each year.

We believe these results show responsible ownership and performance reinforce each other, and we intend to keep building on both.

Read the full 2026 Sustainability Report here.

Disclosures:

“This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute advice, a recommendation, or an offer to sell or solicit any security or financial product. Inherent in any investment is the risk of loss.”

“Specific investments described herein do not represent all investment decisions made by MG. The reader should not assume that investment decisions identified and discussed were or will be profitable. Specific investment advice references provided herein are for illustrative purposes only and are not necessarily representative of investments that will be made in the future.”