ICG’s Strategic Equity unit has surpassed the target of its latest secondaries vehicle to collect what is the market’s largest fund focusing on concentrated GP-led deals.
US Securities and Exchange Commission filings show the London-listed firm has raised $6.35 billion for ICG Strategic Equity Fund V. It is unclear if the fund has held its final close and a spokesperson for ICG declined to comment.
Secondaries Investor reported last year that Fund V was targeting $6 billion.
Fund V launched in November 2022, according to Secondaries Investor data, and has already surpassed its predecessor, the $5.3 billion Fund IV. That fund also surpassed its target, which was $5 billion.
ICG is the 12th-largest secondaries firm by fundraising, according to the SI 50.
At $6.35 billion, Fund V is already the largest dedicated fund focusing on single-asset transactions, according to Secondaries Investor data.
Funds IV and V have eclipsed the size of other vehicles focused on GP-leds, including single-asset and concentrated deals, such as LGT Capital Partners’ Crown Secondaries Special Opportunities III, Blackstone’s Strategic Partners GP Solutions and Morgan Stanley Investment Management’s Ashbridge Transformational Secondaries Fund II.
Secondaries buyers in the first half of this year increasingly sought out highly concentrated single-asset continuation funds in response to the diversified portfolios they have acquired on the LP-led side of the market, according to Campbell Lutyens’ Secondary Market Half-year 2024 Survey. Of the $27.6 billion of GP-led activity between January and end-June, $17.2 billion was deployed into single-asset or highly concentrated continuation funds. That compares with $8.2 billion going into multi-asset continuation funds.
Secondaries firms have been increasingly separating their investment strategies into dedicated specialist funds, as Secondaries Investor has reported. Concentration limits that restrict a fund from having too much exposure to a given asset mean some secondaries funds are capped at how much they can invest in such processes. These caps could typically be between 5 and 10 percent of a fund’s total exposure.
Having a dedicated vehicle to GP-led deals or single assets, for example, can allow greater investing firepower where a main flagship fund may have concentration limits for particular transaction types.
ICG is also planning to launch an “institutional-quality evergreen” product named Core Private Equity this year, chief investment officer and chief executive Benoît Durteste said on the firm’s full-year earnings call in May. That fund will offer US wealth investors “differentiated access to private equity through the secondary market”, Durteste said.
The timing of Core PE’s first close is uncertain and could be in the next financial year, Durteste said.
– Madeleine Farman and Adam Le contributed to this report
