Meet ICG's Uzair Dossani, a two-decade veteran in private-equity who just closed a deal for "a jewel of a business"

• Insider's Banker of the Week series appears in our weekday newsletter, 10 Things on Wall Street.
• This week we're featuring Uzair Dossani, a managing director at Intermediate Capital Group.

Uzair Dossani — a managing director at Intermediate Capital Group, an investment manager with $71 billion in assets under management — just closed a deal on Thursday for what he described as a "jewel of a business."

Dossani leads ICG's North American private-equity group, and his team bought Seaway Plastics Engineering. The company engineers components for medical devices and the broader healthcare space.

Healthcare acquisitions have been like catnip for private-investment firms in recent years, especially since the pandemic fundamentally changed how consumers monitor their wellbeing, and shifted how healthcare-service providers interact with patients.

Since he joined ICG in 2020, Dossani and Kevin Gregory, his co-head of North American private equity, began collaborating on opportunities to find companies that specialize in outsourced medical-component production.

"I spent a lot of time in plastics packaging and component manufacturing, so I was familiar with the production process," Dossani told Insider. "Kevin brought the end-market expertise."

To get the deal done, Dossani and his team conducted the usual amount of market research, but it also built relationships with sector executives and evaluated a "few opportunities" before landing on Seaway.

While he didn't disclose the other acquisition targets, Dossani said in Seaway, he'd "found what he had been looking for."

Dossani — who studied engineering — started as an intern coding for a satellite firm. But he's spent the better part of two decades at investment firms like Warburg Pincus, Charlesbank Capital Partners, and middle-market investor Harvest Partners, before joining ICG.

"I ended up going into strategy consulting, which, given my engineering background, thought would be a nice intro to how business worked. But after a couple of years, I got frustrated by just providing recommendations versus actually being able to act on my analysis," he said.

That led him to private equity, and after more than 20 years he said he still loves it.

"The first business I invested in was an automotive company that manufactured everything from fuzzy dice to steering-wheel covers. It taught me two things: 1 - management is the most important thing to get right in an investment. 2 - even if your product or service is not that differentiated, you can grow nicely if you execute."

Dossani's not a Wall Street banker churning out transactions at a bulge-bracket lender, but for a nuanced deal in a somber environment for deal making, he's a reminder of the swath of middle-market efforts that can sometimes be overlooked.

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