HarbourVest Partners, a global private equity fund of funds, has raised a $1 billion corpus to invest in Asia, Europe and other areas outside of North America. The firm, which is raising HarbourVest International Private Equity VI, a $3 billion fund, has a sub-fund for various regions. The corpus for the Asia sub-fund will be $500 million out of the targeted corpus, reports Financial News.
HarbourVest will start investing from the new fund in fall of this year. The FoF also has sub-corpus for emerging markets, which excludes Asia, which will invest $300 million in Russia, Africa and Latin America. The amount available for international investments is higher as the firm plans to finance its secondary investments through a dedicated fund, the $2 billion Dover Street VII Fund. Previously all the secondary investments were made through its fund of funds.
Some of the investors the new international fund include Sacramento County Employees Retirement Scheme, which has invested $50 million for the entire fund and Washington State Investment Board, which has invested $50 million for the Asia-Pacific sub-fund and the emerging markets sub-fund.
HarbourVest is still investing out of its $3.5 billion fifth fund, and is also making commitments out of its other 4500 million Asia fund of funds. Some of the funds which HarbourVest has invested in Asia include CVC CapitalPartner Asia Pacific, Archer Partners and Pacific Equity Partners.
Increasing number of global FoFs are showing interest in investing in India. Capvent AG, the Zurich-headquartered fund of funds, has started investing in the country out of its second fund of $250 million exclusively set aside for India. Their first FoF was of size $125 million. The others who have a presence in India include Evolvence India Fund (EIF), with a corpus of $67.8 million, and Thomas Weisel India Opportunities Fund, who had a corpus of $60 million. Thomas Weisel India has been recently acquired by Guggenheim Partners. Other large funds like Partners Group and Rho Funds are also looking at setting up shop in India.
