With over 70 investment professionals and offices in London, New York, Mumbai and Singapore, our team covers a range of predominantly equity focused mandates from growth stage equity, infra equity and later stage buyout through allocations to directly sourced deals, partner third party funds and co-investments opportunities.
The three business areas of Private Equity, Catalyst and Real Assets are supported by dedicated teams with a breadth of experience and diverse range of backgrounds. These include:
- Portfolio Management
- Operational Due Diligence
- Impact & ESG Specialists
- Investment Specialists
Our capabilities
For more than two decades, our team has committed over $13bn* to over 180 distinct third party managers. With a tilt towards the mid-market, we allocate to a globally diversified portfolio of best of breed manager primary funds and complimentary co-investments. The team oversee a range of mandates, including those targeting impact outcomes aligned to strong financial returns and a significant evergreen solution.
We aim to provide investors with exposure to a diversified portfolio of attractive private equity investments, with an emphasis on leading buyout, growth equity and venture capital managers in Europe and Asia.
We offer exposure to this asset class through a series of fund-of-funds, co-investment funds, and segregated separate accounts. Our fund-of-funds vehicles are frequently exposed to more than 100 underlying private companies, which have the potential to offer investors premium returns through high growth and attention to operational improvement.
* £10.9bn, €11bn. Figures are approximate and for illustrative purposes only.
In 2021 the Catalyst team secured a $6bn impact focused seed mandate from the Prudential Assurance Company. These monies are directed to purpose driven companies through growth equity, asset equity or credit. Since then, the team has invested in or lent to over 60 companies driving positive impact around three core themes of tackling climate change, driving access to healthcare solutions and reducing societal inequality.
The Catalyst team invests with conviction based on evidence that the best performance will be delivered by purposeful businesses that build and scale the most innovative solutions to the biggest challenges facing people and the planet.
These businesses all display three common characteristics:
- Pathway to technology de-risking
- Proven commercial opportunities
- Defensive moat
Purposeful businesses want purposeful investors. Catalyst demonstrates strong alignment with purpose-driven investees with a focus on intentionality and additionality. Impact is an inherent part of our investment process from inception and throughout our investment. The impact of the Catalyst portfolio is both independently and internally assessed according to the ‘IMP’ Five Dimensions of Impact framework.
Impact framework
- What: Tells us what outcome the company is contributing to, whether it is positive or negative, and how important the outcome is for stakeholders.
- Who: Tells us which stakeholders are experiencing the outcome and how underserved they are in relation to the outcome.
- How much: Tells us how many stakeholders experienced the outcome, what degree of change they experienced, and how long they experienced it for.
- Contribution: Tells us whether a company’s and/or investor’s efforts resulted in outcomes that were likely better than what would have occurred otherwise.
- Risk: Tells us the likelihood that impact will be different than expected.
Since the late 1990s our Real Assets team have invested equity in mid-market, growth focused specialist primary funds and co-investments mainly across essential infrastructure, sustainable agriculture and natural capital. Our existing portfolios contain c.300 underlying assets which aim to invest in or create defensive assets with natural or contractual protection. These are typically inflation-linked in nature and aim to generate high cash-flow on behalf of our investor clients.
The primary focus of our Real Assets solutions is to fund the building, replacing, and operating of essential infrastructure that supports sustainable economies. These strategies can also aim to protect and restore our planet through sustainable agriculture and natural capital.
Institutional clients can access these solutions through open-ended vehicles providing access to a global portfolio of real asset investments that aim to deliver a positive environmental or social impact, while seeking attractive equity returns. We provide traditional as well as impact driven mandates through both seperately managed accounts and evergreen solutions.