Committed Capital closes third fund on €55m

The vehicle held a first close in December 2019. Zuidbroek Notarissen provided legal advice on the fundraise.

Committed Capital was founded in 2008 and was formerly known as Soestdijk Capital. The firm has since raised three vehicles.

"Fund I closed in 2008, which was a totally different time for us," Wai Ki Chiu, a founding partner at Committed Capital, told Unquote. "It was only €5m, I started by myself with three informal investors. A first-time fund takes some time to realise returns, so it was nine years before we had sufficient track record to present new LPs. We are accelerating the development of our fund size now, and we have gone from €22m to €55m, which took around three years."

The GP's second fund closed in April 2017 on €22m. Investments from the fund include FYEO Medical. Its first fund backed DataExpert, which it sold to Quadrum Capital in July 2019.

Investors
The GP's second fund was backed by family offices and individual investors. Asked about the LP base for the third fund, Chiu said: "We informed our current LP base in the last fund about the fundraising to find out what the appetite was to invest in a new fund, which was quite a success – almost all the investors decided to re-invest and up their commitments to the new fund, so this was a good sign that the existing LP base were happy an confident with the investment in our previous fund. We covered the majority of the new fund with previous LPs, and for the remaining part we filled it with new LPs, who mainly consist of family offices and institutionals, which is why we were able to raise the fund in two months."

The new fund will mainly have backing from Netherlands-based investors, as well as some from elsewhere in Europe.

Investments
"The investment strategy is in line with previous fund, the biggest and maybe only difference is that the fund size is larger, which means that we are able to do deals with larger sizes," Chiu said. "On the other hand, we will maintain our strategy for companies with €1-5m EBITDA, we are still interested in this space and it fits with our investment strategy."

The vehicle will focus on Netherlands-based SMEs with revenues of at least €5m, investing for majority or minority stakes. It will make 8-10 platform investments.

Asked about the fund's sector focus, Chiu said: "We are sector-agnostic, but we do have some specialisations and experience, the majority of our investments are focused on technology companies. We are interested in companies that are scaleable, with in-house IP in place, and there should be a possibility of building a recurring business. In general, we don't invest in companies with a lot of capex but we do look for companies with the possibility of internationalisation."

Chiu told Unquote: "We have three deals in the pipeline in total, one of which we will disclose next week. For another deal, we are in the documentation phase, so we have almost done the entire process, I think within one month or six weeks we can close the deal and disclose this."

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