A factory floor in 2026 looks little like its counterpart from a decade ago. Sensors track machine vibration in real time, software schedules production runs that once lived on whiteboards, and robotic arms handle tasks that companies struggled to staff. American producers are pouring money into the buildings and systems that make this possible, and a specific kind of private-equity investor has taken notice. Middle-market firms that organize themselves around defined industries, rather than chasing deals across every category, treat industrial technology as one of a handful of areas worth deep, repeated study.
JP Conte sits among those investors. Managing partner of a San Francisco middle-market private equity firm and founder of his family office Lupine Crest Capital, launched in March 2025, Conte has spent three decades inside a sector-focused model focusing on four areas: healthcare, financial services, software, and industrial technology. Industrial technology earns its place on that short list for reasons grounded in spending data, automation orders, and the durable revenue that factory software tends to generate.
A building boom with a software core
American manufacturers have been constructing new plants at a pace without modern precedent. Real spending on manufacturing construction roughly doubled between the end of 2021 and mid-2023, and most of that growth came from a single segment: computer, electronic, and electrical manufacturing, where real construction spending nearly quadrupled after the start of 2022. That category had been a minor slice of factory construction for decades. It now dominates.
Total manufacturing construction spending reached a record of roughly $240 billion at a seasonally adjusted annual rate in August 2024 before easing in the quarters that followed. Each new semiconductor fabrication plant, battery facility, and electronics line carries a digital backbone behind the concrete. Production scheduling tools, quality-inspection systems, equipment-monitoring platforms, and warehouse management software run continuously once a plant comes online, and they tend to stay embedded for the life of the facility. Jean-Pierre Conte doesn’t just see buildings. The buildings imply years of recurring software and service contracts attached to assets that are expensive to relocate.
Automation demand broadens past the auto plant
Robotics order data tells a parallel story. North American companies ordered 31,311 robots valued at $1.963 billion in 2024, slight increases over the prior year in both units and revenue. The headline numbers held roughly flat, but the composition shifted in a way that matters for anyone underwriting long-term demand.
Automotive companies once drove most robot purchases. That dependence has loosened. Food and consumer goods became the fastest-growing buyer in 2024, with orders climbing 65%, while life sciences, pharmaceutical, and biomedical orders rose 46%. A broader customer base reduces the boom-and-bust pattern that historically made factory-equipment investing difficult. When a dozen industries adopt automation, a slowdown in any one of them no longer sinks the whole category. That diversification is the kind of feature JP Conte looks for before committing capital across a full hold period.
Reshoring turns a policy goal into order flow
Manufacturers are doing more than building and automating; many are moving production back toward U.S. customers. Companies announced 244,000 manufacturing jobs through reshoring and foreign direct investment in 2024, and more than 2 million such jobs have been announced since 2010. Reshoring by U.S.-headquartered companies outpaced foreign direct investment by the widest margin on record that year.
The character of those jobs reinforces the case for technology suppliers. Roughly 88% of the 2024 announced positions sat in high or medium-high tech sectors, led by computer and electronics, electrical equipment, and transportation equipment. Firms cited shorter supply chains and reduced exposure to geopolitical risk as motivations. New domestic plants need control software, automation hardware, and supply-chain coordination tools from day one, and a U.S.-based facility is harder to abandon than an offshore contract. That permanence converts a policy trend into a multiyear stream of orders for the companies that supply factory technology.
Why recurring revenue suits a patient owner
The investment style Jean-Pierre Conte is known for favors holding businesses for years, backing existing management, and improving operations rather than relying on financial engineering alone. Industrial technology fits that approach because its revenue arrives in predictable, repeating slices. Manufacturing-execution software, equipment-monitoring subscriptions, and maintenance contracts renew on schedules measured in years, not quarters. A producer that installs a quality-control system or a plant-floor analytics platform rarely rips it out. Switching would mean halting production and retraining staff, and that’s a cost few plants take on lightly.
That stickiness gives an owner room to grow a business steadily. Recurring contracts make cash flow easier to forecast, which supports add-on acquisitions and measured operational changes over a long hold. Industrial technology also sits at the intersection of three of the firm’s named focus areas, blending software economics with physical-world demand from manufacturers. A company building plant-scheduling software carries the margins and renewal rates of a software business while serving customers anchored to expensive, long-lived facilities.
Sector concentration is the mechanism that makes these bets workable. A generalist fund encountering a factory-analytics company must build conviction from scratch. A firm that has studied industrial technology for years already knows which niches hold pricing advantage, which carry customer concentration risk, and which management teams have delivered. JP Conte’s continued emphasis on the category follows a straightforward calculation: the data on construction, automation orders, and reshoring all point toward sustained demand, and recurring-revenue suppliers are positioned to capture it for years rather than a single cycle.
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Disclaimer: This article is for informational and editorial purposes only and does not constitute investment, financial, legal, or tax advice. References to companies, sectors, market trends, or individuals should not be interpreted as a recommendation or endorsement. Readers should conduct their own research and consult a qualified professional before making investment decisions.
