Cariano sponsor Atena Equity Partners sells business and preps new fund

Nelson Rodrigues
21 June 2023

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Atena Equity Partners, the Portuguese private equity (PE) firm, has just signed a deal to sell portfolio company Cariano and is in the process of raising EUR 60m for its new fund, founding partners João Rodrigues Santos told Unquote sister publication Mergermarket.

Atena has sold Cariano, a Portuguese provider of crane rental and maintenance services on wind farms and industries, to larger rival Grupo Tagar, the executive said. Since Atena acquired Cariano in 2021, the sponsor has increased the company's revenues by 50% to EUR 6.6m and increased its staff count by 10%, he added.

No deal value was revealed, although Santos said it was a successful exit with interesting returns in an environment where financial exits have been difficult. He declined to reveal its internal rate of return (IRR) but said that PE funds typically target an IRR of 20% to 25% and Atena is in the top quartile performance of European buyout funds.

This was the first exit of the PE's second fund, Atena II, and is its fifth exit overall, the executive said. The sale process of another potential exit, Prado Cartolinas da Lousã, has been put on hold, he said. It will revisit binding offers at the end of the year, he added. It is also looking at its portfolio and considering another exit, but he declined to say which one.

At the time of publication, Prado had a Likely to Exit (LTE) score of 60, according to Mergermarket's Likely to Exit (LTE) predictive algorithm.*

Atena is also in talks with investors for its third fund, Atena III, which will follow its previous investment strategy of investing in complex buyouts, particularly distressed assets and succession issues, Santos said. It expects to close this fundraising in the fourth quarter of this year, he added.

The PE is talking mainly to European fund of funds and family offices and a few US-based investors, specifically endowments and foundations, the executive said. Several investors have due diligence underway, he added.

The PE firm has a strong pipeline of potential deals and usually looks at 200 deal opportunities per year, Santos said. It is currently carrying out due diligence on four targets. He declined to identify them but said IT, data analytics, and industrials are some of the sectors it is looking at. Around half of the companies in its portfolio are export-driven companies and half are companies in domestic resilient sectors, such as healthcare, education, and renewables, he added.

*Based on a number of key industry, holding behaviour, and dealflow criteria, Mergermarket's next-generation platform assigns a Likely to Exit (LTE) score to each exit opportunity, with a higher score corresponding to a higher likelihood for an imminent transaction.