Castik closes debut fund at €1bn – privateequityinternational.com

04.08.2015

European Private Investment Club has six LPs and “significant co-investment potential”. Luxembourg based private equity firm Castik Capital has announced the final close of its European Private Investment Club (EPIC I) at €1 billion.

The fund has only six investors and will make a maximum of five investments, Castik investment partner Michael Phillips told Private Equity International.

“We were targeting a specific type of large institutional investor that we see as partners,” Phillips said, noting that the fund has “significant co-investment potential.”

Phillips declined to describe its limited partners except to say they were all large professional institutional investors from North America, Europe and Asia with growing asset bases.

EPIC is targeting European headquartered companies in transactions of €300 million to €1 billion in which it will invest €100 million to €250 million of equity and hold for up to ten years. “We are looking for growing companies in industries that are fragmented that we can support over many years to be industry leaders,” Phillips said.

Phillips was formerly senior equity partner at Apax Partners and leads a 20-strong investment team with investment partners and former Apax executives Marc-Oliver Jauch and Michael Gröber.

Sectors of interest for the fund include light manufacturing, speciality healthcare, technology and, to a lesser extent, heavy manufacturing and automotive, he said.

“It’s a focused portfolio. We spoke to investors and they like upper mid-market, long term holds and they liked the idea of having a more direct partnership with the GP,” Phillips said.

When asked about the gap between the fund’s first close in June 2014 at €625 million and the final close, Phillips said the firm took a break after six months of fundraising to make its investment in water dispenser company Waterlogic and resumed fundraising in February of this year.

Waterlogic was formerly listed on the AIM market and the investment was followed by a series of bolt-on acquisitions, the statement said.

“If we did one more investment this year, that would be great,” Phillips said when asked about the fund’s pipeline.

For more information: https://www.privateequityinternational.com/update-castik-closes-debut-fund-at-e1bn/