Meketa opens Portland office

Meketa Investment Group has opened an office in Portland, Oregon, according to principal Mika Malone who will head the office.

“Meketa Investment Group has attracted a number of clients in the Pacific Northwest over the past several years,” Malone said. “My goal is to expand Meketa’s history of serving the institutional marketplace.”

Malone said Meketa’s first client in the region is an Alaskan institutional investor that currently does not have any private equity exposure.

“Typically those clients are the clients we look for secondaries funds for, because some of them aren’t large enough to make primary fund commitments or to put together a whole portfolio.”

Mika added other institutional funds in the region are active in the secondaries market and Meketa evaluates those funds as part of a private equity allocation.

Meketa selected Portland because the city is centrally located and the firm already does a lot of research there, Malone explained. Right now, Malone is the only professional in the office, but she expects the office to grow to five employees in the next one to three years.

The office officially opened on Tuesday, about one month after the firm opened its London office—its first outside of the US.

“We are excited about the additional resources the Portland office, along with our recently opened London location, brings to Meketa’s clients and how the offices will support our growth over the coming years,” Meketa founder and chief executive officer James Meketa said in the statement.

Meketa’s London office is staffed with three investment professionals, including managing principal Stephen McCourt, who relocated from Meketa’s San Diego office.

Meketa regularly purchases limited partner interests in funds for its clients through the secondaries market. Historically, the firm’s activity has been on the buy-side, although the firm also reviews its clients’ portfolios for potential sale candidates.