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Booktrack has closed a Series B investment round of USD5 million with COENT Venture Partners and Sparkbox Ventures as two of the lead investors.
Known as a trailblazer in the industry, Booktrack previously raised USD3 million USD with its Series A financing led by Sparkbox Ventures the previous year. The company will leverage the recent closing of the Series B investment round to drive rapid growth through marketing innovation, the acquisition of premium content and allowing any publisher, self-publisher or musician to create and sell Booktrack titles through the Booktrack marketplace.
This announcement comes on the heels of other
BrightBytes has secured a USD33 million Series C financing led by New York-based private equity and venture capital firm Insight Venture Partners, with Bessemer Venture Partners, Rethink Education and Learn Capital also participating.
The capital will be used to expand BrightBytes' Clarity platform for K-12 leaders, continue globalisation of its customer base and develop engineering and customer success teams. As part of the transaction Nick Sinai, Venture Partner at Insight Venture Partners will join the BrightBytes board of directors.
Combining data analytics with sleek user-friendly design, BrightBytes' Clarity platform provides fast, informative answers for administrators managing a diverse range of
Audible founder and CEO Donald Katz (pictured), Prudential Financial Vice Chairman Mark Grier and other leaders announced the formation of Newark Venture Partners at an event attended by Senator Cory Booker, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, Acting Governor of New Jersey Kim Guadagno, former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, former Nebraska Governor and US Senator Bob Kerrey.
Newark Venture Partners leaders will manage an early-stage investment fund that will provide capital as well as sophisticated company-building services and a collaborative state-of-the-art 25,000-square-foot accelerator workspace with lightning-fast Wi-Fi and ultra-high bandwidth access to the Internet for innovative tech start-ups in Newark.
This article investigates the future plans of institutional investors in infrastructure, featuring the latest data from the Preqin Quarterly Update: Infrastructure, Q2 2015.
When investing in the infrastructure space, the majority of investors will target domestic opportunities in the next year (Fig 1). However, a large proportion of investors also seek geographical diversification when making investments, particularly North America-based institutions, with 57 per cent of these investors targeting global opportunities in the next 12 months.
As the infrastructure asset class matures and investors become more sophisticated, many establish separate infrastructure allocations, as opposed to targeting the asset class through
This extract from the Preqin Quarterly Update: Private Debt, Q2 2015 offers insight into the annualised contributions and distributions of direct lending and mezzanine funds, as well as examining the current record levels of dry powder in the asset class.
Fig 1 shows the relationship of annualised contributions and distributions, as well as the net cash flows, for an investor with a USD10 million commitment to a direct lending fund. This examination of the typical cash flows to and from an investor further highlights the relative illiquidity of the private debt asset class. Given the lower risk/return profile of direct
KKR is to acquire from Gestamp Renewables an 80 per cent stake in Gestamp Asetym Solar, a global solar PV developer and operator. The investment is funded by KKR Global Infrastructure Investors II, a USD3.1 billion global fund.
The transaction values Gestamp Solar at a total enterprise value of around USD1 billion. Both partners have committed to fully support Gestamp Solar´s ambitious strategic plan to have in operation up to 2.5GW of installed capacity by 2020.
Gestamp Solar, founded in 2005, has rapidly grown into a globally recognised player in the PV space. Today, the business is present in
State Street Corporation has announced the results of the GX Private Equity Index (PEI), a benchmark for comparative analysis of private equity performance, which includes a comprehensive data set dating back nearly three decades.
In the first quarter of 2015, the index saw an overall return of two per cent. The index is based on directly sourced limited partnership data and represents more than USD2.2 trillion of private equity investments, with more than 2,400 unique private equity partnerships, as of 31 March, 2015.
“We have observed significant amounts of capital being returned to investors with fund distributions outpacing capital
Lyceum Capital, the growth investor, has expanded its investment team with the appointment of Thomas Keen (pictured) as an investment executive.
Keen joins Lyceum from CIL Management Consultants during which time he worked on over 30 commercial due diligence projects for many different UK mid-market private equity houses.
At Lyceum, Keen will work with the investment team to originate, support and execute new platform investments and add-on acquisitions for existing portfolio companies. His appointment is the third in 2015 following new operations and development partner Geoff Neville and investment executive Alistair Gray.
Simon Hitchcock, partner at Lyceum, says:
Baird has expanded its global Healthcare Investment Banking coverage and European Investment Banking group with the appointment of Vincenzo Di Nicola (pictured) as a Managing Director in London.
In his new role, Di Nicola will lead Baird’s European Healthcare Investment Banking practice and be responsible for expanding sector coverage in Europe.
Di Nicola was most recently Co-Head of UK Healthcare Investment Banking at DC Advisory in London where he led several high profile deals in the med-tech, pharma and healthcare services spaces. Before DC Advisory, he was Vice President of Healthcare Investment Banking at RBS/ABN AMRO Corporate Finance and
Greece is back from the brink and now it is like the latest leg of the Greek saga was just a bad dream. The 85% probability of Grexit which some prominent commentators predicted a few days ago is now forgotten and market conditions in Europe have normalized in the wink of an eye. During the period under review, the Eurostoxx 50 was up 9.5%, equity volatility fell 10% (VSTOXX), high yield spreads tightened 26 bps in Europe and the 10-year bund yield rose by the same order of magnitude.
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