Private equity firm Riverside has opened an office in Melbourne, Australia as part of Riverside Asia Fund.
The new office will focus principally on finding and evaluating attractive middle market opportunities in Australia, strengthening Riverside’s presence in the Asia Pacific region.
The Melbourne office complements RAF offices in Hong Kong, China; Tokyo, Japan; and Seoul, South Korea.
In addition to its anticipated upcoming investments, RAF I has made three investments – two platforms and one add-on.
Riverside, which invests in growing companies with enterprise values of USD200m or less, now has 19 offices in 13 countries on four continents around the world.
Riverside’s Australian efforts are being led by Partner Simon Feiglin, who joined Riverside in 2007 and has been working closely with the RAF team since 2008.
“We have spent the last 18 months developing our deal pipeline in Australia and have been impressed with the large number of high-quality, privately owned businesses which are available for sale. We are excited to apply our operationally-focused business model to begin helping local entrepreneurs expand their sales opportunities both domestically and internationally using our global business development teams,” says Riverside Asia Fund manager Stu Baxter.
Feiglin is a native of Melbourne who was most recently based in Riverside’s Cleveland office. He has extensive experience with the RAF team, and has also worked with the Riverside Micro-Cap Fund, which focuses on smaller LBO deals.
RAF, which invests in the developed economies in the Asia Pacific region, has three companies under letter of intent.
Riverside co-chief executive Béla Szigethy (pictured) says: “Ever since we launched RAF in 2008, we’ve known that Australia was the next logical step, and we’ve been building relationships there for years in anticipation of this day. We are excited by Australia’s abundance of entrepreneurial small cap managerial talent and successful economic ties with growing Asian markets, as well as the wonderful opportunity to open addressable markets for successful products and services and exporting the best of Australia to the rest of the world.”
