Private equity firm Carlyle Group's managing director, Mahesh Parasuraman, has put in his papers at the global PE firm and is joining Sunil Vasudevan, a former partner of India Value Fund Advisors (IVFA), to jointly run an independent growth capital investment firm, sources told VCCircle.
As first reported by VCCircle last June, Vasudevan had quit IVFA last year to launch Amicus Capital. Parasuraman is joining this new PE firm, which plans to raise around $200 million in its first fund.
Messages and emails sent to Carlyle and Parasuraman did not elicit a response. The news of Parasuraman quitting Carlyle was first reported by Business Standard.
Carlyle has separate teams operating in India—while one looks after growth equity deals, the other invests in larger opportunities, including buyouts. Parasuraman was part of the team looking after the former unit.
The investments where he was involved included Tirumala Milk Products, Repco Home Finance, Newgen Knowledge Works, LearningMate and Elitecore Technologies. Carlyle struck notable exits from some of these, including Tirumala (sale to Lactalis) and Repco (open market share sales besides part exit to Creador).
Meanwhile, Bengaluru-based Amicus Capital will be investing across sectors including consumer, financial services, technology, pharmaceutical and healthcare. “It will provide early stage growth capital between $8 million and $25 million,†said a source privy to the development.
The fund is yet to apply to SEBI for registration under the AIF norms. This is partly due to the fact that Sunil Vasudevan, former partner at IVFA, has a contract which disallows him to start any competing fund for a year after leaving the firm.
Vasudevan has done many deals for IVFA including DM Healthcare, Trinethra and Biocon.
Amicus Capital is going to raise money from a bunch of domestic HNIs and institutions as well as international institutional investors. The fund is currently in soft discussions with anchor investors.
Several experienced executives with large PE firms had quit to float their own investment outfits around six-seven years ago with CVCI's Ajay Relan quitting to float CX Partners, ICICI Venture's Renuka Ramnath starting Multiples PE, Temasek's Manish Kejriwal and General Atlantic's Sunish Sharma floating Kedaara Capital and Baring India PE's Subu Subramaniam launching MCap.
However, this trend dissipated a few years ago as some people struggled to raise money under new funds.
The positive investment sentiment over the last one year has led another wave of such movements. Another such development was when Heram Hajarnavis quit KKR to float a new PE firm.
(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)
