Carlyle raises greater than $3 billion to spend money on European tech By Reuters

By Emma-Victoria Farr

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – U.S. buyout agency Carlyle Group (NASDAQ:) has raised greater than three billion euros ($3.12 billion) for a pan-European know-how fund that’s benefiting from “pockets of life” within the financial system, the co-heads of Carlyle Europe Know-how Companions advised Reuters.

Targeted on decrease mid-market and development know-how corporations throughout Europe, the fund, referred to as CETP V, has exceeded its 2.5 billion euro goal in lower than a 12 months of fundraising, greater than doubling the scale of the earlier fund CETP IV.

With a mean funding horizon of 5 years, it’s concentrating on areas corresponding to cybersecurity, digital transformation and cleantech, in addition to software program functions for monetary providers, healthcare and infrastructure, Michael Wand and Vladimir Lasocki stated.

Lasocki stated there have been alternatives in much less impacted personal markets, regardless of the plunge in tech valuations and a broad tech selloff in public markets following the pandemic and disaster brought on by the Ukraine battle.

Carlyle goals to spend money on roughly 20-30 corporations by the brand new fund and normally will purchase a majority stake.

It’s going to, nevertheless, reserve about 15% of the fund for development fairness transactions, Wand and Lasocki stated.

The fund will write fairness cheques of as much as 250 million euros, leading to offers from between 100 million euros and 500 million euros in enterprise worth, they stated.

Focusing on B2B know-how companies in Europe, Carlyle will help portfolio corporations with plans to grow to be extra worldwide, for instance breaking into the U.S. market.

It’s going to additionally work with the businesses to improve administration groups and speed up development by way of M&A transactions, the co-heads stated.

The fund already already has two investments – Euro Techno Com Group (ETC) a value-added distributor of telecoms gear which it bought to Cinven in June, rolling on a minority stake into its new fund, and digital advertising company Incubeta, which it acquired earlier this month.

($1 = 0.9625 euros)