Carlyle raises greater than $3 billion to put money into European tech By Reuters

© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: The emblem of the Carlyle Group is displayed on the firm’s workplace in Tokyo, Japan October 17, 2018. REUTERS/Issei Kato/File Picture

By Emma-Victoria Farr

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – U.S. buyout agency Carlyle Group (NASDAQ:) has raised greater than three billion euros ($3.12 billion) for a pan-European know-how fund that’s benefiting from “pockets of life” within the financial system, the co-heads of Carlyle Europe Know-how Companions advised Reuters.

Targeted on decrease mid-market and development know-how firms throughout Europe, the fund, known as CETP V, has exceeded its 2.5 billion euro goal in lower than a 12 months of fundraising, greater than doubling the scale of the earlier fund CETP IV.

With a median funding horizon of 5 years, it’s concentrating on areas reminiscent of cybersecurity, digital transformation and cleantech, in addition to software program purposes for monetary providers, healthcare and infrastructure, Michael Wand and Vladimir Lasocki mentioned.

Lasocki mentioned there have been alternatives in much less impacted non-public markets, regardless of the plunge in tech valuations and a broad tech selloff in public markets following the pandemic and disaster attributable to the Ukraine struggle.

Carlyle goals to put money into roughly 20-30 firms by the brand new fund and generally will purchase a majority stake.

It would, nevertheless, reserve about 15% of the fund for development fairness transactions, Wand and Lasocki mentioned.

The fund will write fairness cheques of as much as 250 million euros, leading to offers from between 100 million euros and 500 million euros in enterprise worth, they mentioned.

Concentrating on B2B know-how companies in Europe, Carlyle will assist portfolio corporations with plans to turn out to be extra worldwide, for instance breaking into the U.S. market.

It would additionally work with the businesses to improve administration groups and speed up development by way of M&A transactions, the co-heads mentioned.

The fund already already has two investments – Euro Techno Com Group (ETC) a value-added distributor of telecoms tools which it bought to Cinven in June, rolling on a minority stake into its new fund, and digital advertising company Incubeta, which it acquired earlier this month.

($1 = 0.9625 euros)