Happy Fri-yay, Hubsters!! Aaron here on the Wire to close out the week and start the long weekend!
Now before the fun stuff, let’s get to some serious business.
Roe V. Wade. Everyone is talking about this topic, and PEI Media is no exception. Venture Capital Journals’ Lawrence Aragon penned his Friday Letter, raising the question: can we innovate our way out of post-Roe problems?
“Now that the US Supreme Court has ended the constitutional right to an abortion, the pressure is on to create technological solutions to help those negatively impacted by the ruling,” Larry wrote. “Venture capitalists focused on women’s health are more than ready to confront the challenge and are eager to put their capital to work.”
FemHealth Ventures, RH Capital, OMERS Ventures, General Catalyst and Elevate Capital are among those developing innovative products for women’s health.
This Supreme Court decision is shining a spotlight on the overall subject of women’s health, and we here are PE Hub are interested in this topic for any deals. If you know of any PE-backed deals that are related to women’s health, we’d love to hear about them.
We are also curious to hear your thoughts on how this news might affect your current portfolio, or if there is any market chatter about this. Please keep us in the loop and feel free to hit me up at aaron.w@peimedia.com or MK at mk.flynn@peimedia.com.
Infrastructure. Alpine Investors’ engineering services platform, Trilon, has completed five deals since its launch in February. PE Hub’s Obey Martin Manayiti wrote about how the San Francisco private equity firm hopes to make Trilon stand out among infrastructure service providers in North America.
“It’s early days, but we feel like we are off to a good start, and as we compare our progress relative to our business plan, we are ahead,” said Dan Sanner, partner at Alpine. “We have built this story around the idea of creating a functional family of companies, and that is really well received.”
Buyouts’ 100. The team over at Buyouts put together the latest list of top 100 North America private equity firms. Firms were ranked in terms of the most institutional capital over the past five years. KKR, Blackstone, Thoma Bravo, The Carlyle Group and General Atlantic make up the top five.
In the cover story for the July/August magazine, Chris Witkowsky wrote about PE’s “crazed” fundraising pace and if that is going to slow down.
“The rapid commitment pace is due mostly to LPs’ existing managers coming back to market with successor funds, and new products, at a pace faster than ever before. In the past, a private equity buyout manager would be expected back with the successor fund every two to four years,” Chris wrote. “These days, some managers are coming back in a year or less after closing the prior fund.”
Read the story and check out the entire 100 firms here.
In case you missed it. I dropped two PE healthcare spotlight series features this week, with the first profiling NovaQuest Capital Management. The firm pioneered a product finance solution, providing at-risk, nondilutive funding that enables partner companies to advance pivotal clinical trials, launch new brands, license products and acquire accretive products or companies.
A little while back, I had a chance to speak with Jonathan Tunnicliffe, managing partner and chief investment officer and Patrick Jordan, managing partner and chief operating officer about the firm’s strategy.
“We developed a structured finance model targeted at the biopharmaceutical industry, called product finance,” said Tunnicliffe. “It’s a tailored capital solution that … funds innovation in the last R&D stage, Phase III, or in the launch phase of commercialization. We invest alongside a pharmaceutical company in that final stage of R&D, on their most strategically important products, and the returns for us come from lump-sum cash payments on approval by the FDA or the regulatory bodies, and/or from royalties, and everything comes once the product is approved.”
And yesterday, I profiled EQT’s healthcare investments. “Our goal is not to be the largest private equity firm in the world; it is to be the most reputable owner of companies,” said Eric Liu, partner, head of North American private equity and global co-head of healthcare at EQT. “By investing in market leaders, it enables us to implement policies that have impact beyond the individual companies in which we invest.”
Women of influence. Just published today: PEI Media’s Women of Influence, spotlights those whose achievements, innovation and leadership are reshaping private markets across a broad range of asset classes. Private Equity International spotlights 10 women in private equity, including General Atlantic’s Melis Kahya Akar, CPP Investments’ Suyi Kim and KKR’s Alisa Wood.
Summer reading. This is a fun one to end on. Every year, PEI Media’s editors and reporters reach out to professionals across the industry to find out what’s on their summer reading lists. For 2022, we decided to mix things up by only asking LPs. The result is a fascinating mix of first novels, biographies and historical non-fiction – and even a children’s book recommendation for good measure.
Speaking of fun, that is a wrap for me! I am looking forward to eating a lot this weekend (what else is new?) but not sure I will be able to top what I did last week when I ate dinner at Carbone and saw Maya Rudolph sitting not too far from me.
On Monday, the PE Hub staff will be enjoying the holiday, so we won’t publish the Wire. MK will be back with a fresh edition on Tuesday.
Here’s to the long weekend! Wishing everyone a happy but more importantly safe Fourth of July – catch you next week!
Cheers,
Aaron
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