Tata Capital said it has reached the final close of Tata Opportunities Fund LP with commitments of $600 million – one of the largest fundraising by an India-focused vehicle in recent years. The fund made its first close with $450 million in commitments in April 2011.
The fund was launched in November 2010 by Tata Capital Pte Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary in Singapore.
A statement said that the funds were raised from less than 10 limited partners including “large, sophisticated, global institutional investors from North America, Asia and the Middle East, spanning sovereign investors, financial institutions, global corporate and high networth families. Most of the fund’s limited partners have made their largest commitments to an Indian private equity fund through this partnership.”
The fund has an interesting strategy of deploying most of its corpus in Tata Group companies. It will also look at some opportunities outside the Tata Group. The fund will look at both growth and buy-out strategies.
The statement also said that “the fund is scalable materially beyond $600 million of deployable assets since limited partners could also undertake co-investments directly into portfolio companies, alongside the fund, on a mutually discretionary basis.”
So far, the fund has invested in Roots Corporation, which operates budget hotels under the Ginger brand and is a subsidiary of the group firm Indian Hotels Company Ltd (IHCL).
The fund is now headed by Padmanabh Sinha after Mukund Rajan moved to Tata Sons as brand custodian earlier this year.
Tata Capital has been aggressively expanding its private equity business, with five different strategies already operational across Tata Capital Growth Fund I, Tata Capital Healthcare Fund I, Tata Capital Innovations Fund, Tata Capital Special Situations Fund and Tata Opportunities Fund LP.
Moreover, the firm is in the process of raising an overseas PE fund for the African market and is also setting up a power sector fund in partnership with Power Finance Corporation Ltd.
(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)
