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Committed Advisors closes CAPF I on EUR 161m

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France-headquartered Committed Advisors has held a final close for Committed Advisors Primary Fund I (CAPF I) on its hard-cap of EUR 161m; the vehicle targets primary fund deals, early secondaries and co-investments.

The vehicle will invest in primary and early secondary opportunities (defined as funds that are 20-50% deployed), as well as mid-market co-investments.

Goodwin provided legal advice for the fund.

“The fundraise took just over a year – we paused during Covid and then restarted,” Daniel Benin, managing partner and co-founder of Committed Advisors, told Unquote. “We did about 80% of the fundraise from January to September 2021, after an initial close to warehouse a couple of investments in 2020.”

Committed Advisors specialises in direct secondaries and has raised four generations of secondaries funds to date. Committed Advisors Secondary Fund IV held a final close in November 2020 on EUR 1.6bn, surpassing its EUR 1.25bn target. The fund generally invests EUR 10m-100m for small and mid-cap LP stake deals.

CAPF I will act as an extension of the GP’s existing strategy, taking advantage of a broader range of opportunities, Benin told Unquote: “We are leveraging on our existing organisation – the fund is an extension of what we usually do. For the past few years, we have been offered co-investment and early secondaries opportunities through or main funds, and we also had a primary allocation. But we saw an increasing demand for early secondaries, co-investment and primary allocations from a number of investors who were starting a PE allocation or wanted to diversify their allocation and to make their coverage more efficient.”

The strategy is expected to bring a range of advantages to LPs due to its diversification, according to Benin: “We are offering a diversification by geography and sectors, but we are also in a position to mitigate the J-curve due to early economy allocation, and to generate more alpha due to the co-investment allocation.”

The fund’s performance to date has vindicated the strategy, Benin said: “We have already seen some distributions going back to our investors, even though the portfolio is very young. The co-investment portfolio is already marked up by 40%, which has been generated by a combination of a massive increase in the value of a number of co-investments. The fund investments are also up by 20% due to distributions or mark-ups generated by the fund portfolio itself.”

Committed Advisors was founded in 2010 by former Axa Private Equity executives Daniel Benin and Barthélémy de Beaupuy. The firm has offices in Paris, New York and Singapore through which it manages each geographic component of its strategy.

Investors
The fund is backed by 50 LPs, all of which are from Europe. One third of the LP base is made up of existing investors from the GP’s flagship strategy, while the remaining two thirds are new investors, Benin told Unquote.

The majority of the fund’s LP base is made up of high-net-worth individuals and family offices, with institutional investors making up 25%.

Investments
The fund will invest on a global basis, targeting Europe (60%), the US and Asia (40%). The majority of the fund (60%) will be invested in primaries and in early secondaries deals, with around one third reserved for co-investments.

The fund has made 17 co-investments and 20 direct and secondaries investments; the vehicle is expected to make around 30 of both in total and is now 50% deployed, Benin told Unquote. The fund deploys equity tickets of EUR 2m-5m, with an average ticket of EUR 2.5m-3m, focusing on mid-market GPs and co-investments.

Diversification is key to the GP’s co-investment choices. “Our co-investments are diversified across a number of sectors – we don’t want to be overweight in particular sectors or geographies,” Benin told Unquote. “We are targeting profitable companies growing at a good pace, and those that have shown strong resilience or impressive growth through the Covid crisis.”

People
Committed Advisors – Daniel Benin, Barthélémy de Beaupuy (co-founders, managing partners).

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