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Chinese companies have outpaced their western counterparts by value in the top five VC funded companies in the global payments space during 2018, according to GlobalData, a leading and data analytics company.
Of the top five, two companies represented China with a combined value of USD14.73 billion, followed by two American firms with a combined value of USD0.6 billion and one UK-based company with USD0.25 billion.
Ant Financial, the parent company of Alipay (largest mobile payments network in China), has attracted the highest VC funding among all companies in the payments space during the period. Interestingly, the USD14 billion
Monroe Capital has acted as co-lead arranger on the funding of a senior credit facility to support the growth of Mindbody, by private equity sponsor Vista Equity Partners.
Based in San Luis Obispo, California, Mindbody is the leading technology platform for the fitness, beauty and wellness services industries. Local entrepreneurs worldwide use Mindbody’s integrated software and payments platform to run, market and grow their businesses.
Consumers use Mindbody to more easily find, engage and transact with fitness, wellness and beauty providers in their local communities.
SALU Capital (SALU), together with its partners Apex Group (Apex), and Inlife Holding (Inlife), has closed the purchase of all outstanding shares of Augur Financial Opportunities 2 SICAV (AFO-2), a Luxembourg investment vehicle managed by German Augur Capital that includes the fund’s portfolio companies, German life insurer myLife Lebensversicherung (myLife) and Luxembourg-based fund administration and ManCo business LRI Group (LRI ), from the Fund’s investors in a secondary fund buy-out transaction.
The closing of this complex transaction, upon receipt of all regulatory approvals in Germany and in Luxembourg, is the latest step of SALU Capital, a young and growing private
CORE Industrial Partners (CORE), an industrials-focussed private equity firm based in Chicago, has held the final close of CORE Industrial Partners Fund I with total commitments of USD230 million.
The Fund was significantly oversubscribed with demand in excess of an initial target of USD200 million and initial hard cap of USD225 million.
The Fund’s limited partners come from a diversified base of institutional investors including leading university endowments, insurance companies, public pensions, corporate pensions, foundations, asset managers, family offices, and fund of funds.
“We are enormously honoured and humbled by the overwhelming interest in our inaugural fund,”
Following a record year of investment and fundraising activity in 2018, Churchill Asset Management (Churchill), a majority-owned affiliate of Nuveen focussed on originating, underwriting and managing middle market senior loan investments, has promoted Mat Linett, Managing Director, from Deputy Head of Underwriting and Portfolio Management to Head of Underwriting, and Eric Wieczorek to Managing Director, Underwriting and Portfolio Management.
Linett will be responsible for overseeing all underwriting activities at Churchill, working closely with George Kurteson, Head of Portfolio Management. Linett joined the company in April 2015 and has been integral in leading numerous investments, building out the firm’s risk management
BGF has appointed Sophie Brand as an investor in its Leeds office. Brand joins from Deloitte, where she spent nearly eight years working across the firm’s Leeds and London offices.
After qualifying as a Chartered Accountant in Deloitte’s audit practice, Brand has spent the past four years working in the M&A team gaining particular experience of transactions in retail and consumer markets.
Brand’s role at BGF will involve all aspects of the investment process from meeting business owners when they’re first considering funding to due diligence and actively working alongside a number of portfolio companies after completion.
BGF’s
Tax specialist William Jean-Baptiste has joined Ogier’s team in Luxembourg as a tax partner.
Jean-Baptiste (pictured), who joins Ogier’s eight-strong partnership in Luxembourg, focuses on tax structuring of international investment transactions, investment funds and on-going tax management.
His experience covers acquisitions and holding structures for real estate, private equity and private capital investment, financing, mergers, acquisitions and reorganisations of financial institutions, securitisation and structured financial products.
Jean-Baptiste’s corporate and funds tax advisory practice is supplemented by experience in wealth planning and family office services for private clients in the management of their cross-border legal and tax planning needs.
Last year proved to be another significant step forward for private equity, which continues to show little sign of fatigue among institutional allocators. A survey that Private Equity Wire ran with Intralinks last summer – The LP Blueprint 2018 – found that one quarter of LPs said that they planned to increase their allocation by 10 per cent or more; moreover, four out of 10 LPs said their preferred manager size were those running USD100 million to USD1 billion in AUM, which is encouraging news for the global mid-market players.
In Europe, deal volume reached an all-time annual record
Latham & Watkins has appointed Ivana K Rouse as a partner in the Corporate Department and a member of the Investment Funds Practice in the firm’s Houston office.
Rouse’s practice covers a broad range of private funds, including private equity-style energy, credit and mid-market funds, cryptocurrency funds and hedge funds.
“We are excited to welcome Ivana to the Corporate Department and to the firm. She has an excellent track record in the investment funds space and will be be an incredible anchor for the group here in Houston. Her sophisticated experience and legal skills will help clients take
European impact investor, Wermuth Asset Management, has completed its second round of funding under the Green Gateway Fund 2 (GGF2) portfolio, doubling its investment in NexWafe.
Until recently silicon solar wafers have been the costliest single components of a solar module, accounting for around 40 per cent of the total product cost. But new wafer technology company, NexWafe, has stepped in as an industry disruptor with the development of a drop-in replacement for wafers specifically designed for future high efficiency solar cells with a low energy and material consumption during production that significantly brings down the costs.
“The historic
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