Strategic counsel and aligned capital, engaged at the senior levels of the asset and wealth management industries, alongside founders and leadership teams at inception, in scaling, and through transition.
Dilworth Capital Partners was established in London in 2002. It has worked in several forms since then, as a broker-dealer, an offshore fund, and most recently as an investment advisory platform. The focus has stayed the same throughout: building and scaling firms in the asset and wealth management industry.
Today the firm works with a small number of founders and leadership teams building or scaling investment management firms, and stays involved through the key inflection points of their growth. The work runs from building a firm to the outcome its founders are working toward, which for many is an eventual transaction.
Dilworth Capital works as a principal rather than a consultant. The work is hands-on and judged by results, and where there is real conviction in an engagement, compensation is tied to the outcome, through profits interests, performance equity, or, in select cases, the firm's own capital.
Over the years, people have moved in both directions between the firm's ventures and firms such as Point72, Citadel, Tudor, Invesco, Goldman Sachs, and UBS.
Dilworth Capital is independently owned and takes on engagements only where it has real conviction it can add value. Each is handled directly at the most senior level, drawing on relationships with family offices and institutional investors built over decades.
Dilworth Capital works with founders launching new firms. The early decisions are critical, and easy to get wrong under the pressure of a launch: the strategy itself, the choice of capital partners, the structure of the cap table, governance, the founding team, and whether the operating setup can handle early growth. The firm works alongside founders through each of these.
For a firm that is already established, growth is the harder problem. Brand, marketing and distribution carry more weight than they are usually given, and much of what works depends on relationships built over years and on aligning incentives along the value chain. The firm works on growth strategy, the capital behind it, distribution platforms, and the senior hires that scaling depends on.
Every founder eventually steps back. The transitions that go well are prepared years in advance. That preparation is unglamorous work, mostly succession planning and changes in leadership, and how well it is done has a large effect on how the firm is valued when the moment comes.
James K. Dilworth founded Dilworth Capital Partners in London in 2002. Before that he spent eight years at Reuters, in senior roles at Reuters America in Chicago and Reuters UK in London. His work since has been entrepreneurial: he has founded firms, built them, served on their boards, and taken several through to a sale, all within asset and wealth management.
Notable recent exits include Veriti, which he founded, acquired by First Trust in 2022, and tru Independence, where he was a growth investor and board member, acquired by Sanctuary Wealth in 2024.
He is a Strategic Advisor to Echelon Partners.