Mathew Cyriac, the co-head of the private equity business at Blackstone Group in India, is leaving the global PE firm to start his own asset management venture, two persons briefed on the development told VCCircle.
Cyriac, who was appointed the co-head of the India PE business along with Amit Dixit in December 2013, will soon take over Florintree Advisors, a Mumbai alternative asset management firm, one of the persons said.
Acquiring Florintree would help him immediately secure a licence from the capital markets regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India.
Blackstone and Cyriac did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Economic Times, which reported his departure earlier on Wednesday, said that Cyriac planned to launch a public market-focussed fund.
“India has a large number of companies that went public without requisite preparation and maturity. Florintree sees an opportunity to build some of them into ‘real’ public companies through a ‘Friendly Activist’ approach where one would educate and nudge managements of target companies to undertake actions they can easily do,†Cyriac told the newspaper.
Cyriac is likely to formally leave Blackstone over the next few days.
Cyriac was part of multi-bagger transactions at Blackstone, most notably its exit from CMS Info Systems Ltd by selling its stake to Baring PE Asia in 2015. Blackstone’s exit from International Tractors Ltd was one of the top five PE exits in India in 2016.
Cyriac joins a number of private equity professionals who have recently launched public markets-focussed funds. IndGrowth Capital, a firm led by former India Build Out Fund executives and former TPG Growth Partner Varun Kapur, is floating a $100 million fund.
Former ChrysCapital managing partner Gulpreet Kolhi launched a public markets-focussed fund last year. The fund, Mylen Investment, has deployed almost its entire initial corpus.
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