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The Managed Funds Association (MFA) inaugural European Conference, the Global Summit 2015, will be held on 27 October in London.
The conference aims to broaden awareness of the important role alternative investments play in the European Union and help fund managers navigate evolving US and EU regulatory frameworks.
“As the global voice for the alternative investment industry and its investors, MFA is excited to announce our upcoming Global Summit,” says MFA President and CEO Richard H Baker (pictured). “This conference will provide a focused day of content designed to help managers gain clarity on what they need to know
The number of high value buy-out deals in Wales doubled last year, as MBO activity has rebounded to pre-credit crunch levels, according to an analysis by Hugh James solicitors and PwC.
According to Hugh James and PwC, there were six buy-out deals with an enterprise value of more than GBP3million in Wales in 2014 – up from just three in 2013.
The last time there was this number was in 2007. At the height of the recession in 2009 and 2010, no MBO deals of this size were recorded in Wales at all, with only one in 2011.
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:
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