Evoco quadruples headcount since January

Evoco‘s team has grown from two co-founders to eight executives and advisory board members since January, Secondaries Investor has learned.

Evoco is a Swiss direct secondaries firm, founded by partners Felix Ackermann and Michel Galeazzi in 2012.

In January the firm hired Philipp Stoll as an analyst from Capital Dynamics. Nathalie Cassagne also joined the team in March as an office management executive.

Evoco also has three operating partners who serve on its advisory board and support deal flow and portfolio management on a case-by-case basis.

The most recent operating partner Evoco hired is Lindsay Dibden, founder and partner of HgCapital. Others include Benoît Leleux, who is a professor at the IMD business school in Lausanne and Beat Kahli who is chief executive officer of Avalon Park Group in Orlando. Gerhard Beinhauer, an entrepreneur and and investor in small- and medium-sized industrial businesses is also an operating partner.

Evoco looks for direct secondaries opportunities in distressed, orphan and tail-end portfolios. The firm targets the consumer, energy, healthcare, industrial and natural resources sectors in Europe. Investments include elderly care group SENIOcare and a portfolio of six renewable energy companies, according to its website.

Evoco sees a lot of opportunity to restructure dysfunctional funds in continental Europe, particularly in Germany, Galeazzi told Secondaries Investor last month.

“We look at small- and mid-cap buyout funds in continental Europe, where there is a succession situation of the current general partner. There are a lot of smaller [German] private equity funds that were raised in a boom between 2002 and 2007. Now those funds are coming to an end of their lifetime, which reveals whether the GP has a future as a team or if the fund was a one-time structure.

Most of Evoco’s transactions are valued between €20 million and €70 million for each portfolio of between four and six companies, he added.