Oakley Capital closes mid-cap fund at €750m

The private equity house Oakley Capital has raised fresh money. The British investor has closed its second fund Origin II at 750m euros. The capital is intended for companies in the lower mid-market segment.

This means that the new fund exceeds its predecessor Origin I, which was closed in 2021 and is worth 458m euros, by around 65 percent, as Oakley announced. Demand for the second mid-cap fund from institutional investors was very high. According to the PE investor, this includes 18 new limited partners from Europe, the USA and Asia. When asked by FINANCE, Oakley did not disclose the proportion of new and existing investors.

According to Oakley, the fundraising was completed within four months. When asked by FINANCE, Oakley also did not want to disclose whether there was a so-called pre-marketing phase and how long it was.

Oakley’s Origin fund generation is aimed at small and medium-sized companies in the mid-market sector. According to the investor, the Origin II fund will follow the same strategy as its predecessor Origin I and invest in technology-oriented companies with an enterprise value of up to 200m euros. Origin II will acquire both majority and minority stakes in European companies and typically invest up to 75m euros, Oakley explained when asked by FINANCE. Oakley focuses on the technology, business services, digital consumer and education sectors.

The previous fund had already invested primarily in these sectors. The investments from the first Origin fund include the acquisition of the Spanish software developer Seedtag and the investment in Ecommerce One, a provider of SaaS solutions in the DACH region. Last year, Oakley divested itself of a stake in Seedtag early and said it achieved an implied return of 3.5x. Other German investments in the first Origin fund are Gymondo and Vice Golf. As of today, half of the portfolio companies come from Germany. Oakley has not yet made an investment from the new fund, but the deal pipeline is “very strong”.

According to Oakley, since the launch of the Origin strategy, the private equity house has increased the capital invested sevenfold across all previous funds with investments in small and medium-sized medium-sized companies and has an annual return (internal rate of return, IRR) of 96 percent achieved.

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For Oakley, the closing of the Origin II was not the first this year. At the beginning of the year, the investor completed fundraising for the flagship fund V, which has a volume of 2.85 bn euros. In addition, the British have raised a continuation fund of 1.1bn euros for the German university group IU. According to its own information, Oakley has acquired more than 4.8bn euros, invested over 2bn euros and realized 1.3bn euros in the past twelve months.

The fundraising environment is currently challenging as institutional investors evaluate capital commitments for private equity much more strictly than a year ago. Because many private equity investors have already launched new funds in recent months, things are currently rather quieter on the fundraising front. However, there are individual closings: the growth investor Verdane, for example, managed to close its latest fund in mid-September at 1.1bn euros.

Source: FINANCE

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