Tikehau targets as much as $1bn for second credit secondaries vehicle

Tikehau Capital has begun fundraising for its second private credit secondaries vehicle, with the firm bullish on the strategy’s outlook.

Tikehau Private Debt Secondaries II, which launched in July, is targeting between $700 million and $1 billion, according to the Paris-headquartered firm’s second-quarter earnings call.

The strategy’s inaugural vehicle, Tikehau Private Debt Secondaries, closed on $248 million in the second half of 2022, having launched in December 2020, according to Secondaries Investor data.

The private credit secondaries strategy is “clearly poised to scale and become a flagship fund going forward”, Frédéric Giovansili, deputy CEO of Tikehau Investment Management, said on the firm’s earnings call.

“Liquidity has a cost and credit has some value,” Tikehau co-founder Mathieu Chabran said on the call.

When it set up its credit secondaries strategy, the firm was able to “provide this liquidity that did not exist elsewhere, and the supply/demand imbalance that you have in this new strategy is such that even if you’ve got more [market] entrants, the supply side still outweighed by far the availability of capital”. He added that firms are able to generate downside-protected “high-single, low-teens type of returns, which is very much what we are targeting across the strategies”.

Tikehau’s private debt secondaries strategy is headed up by New York-based Pierpaolo Casamento, who has been with the firm since 2016. The firm hired former StepStone Group executive Olga Kosters in 2019 to lead the launch of its debut debt secondaries vehicle. Kosters was poached by Apollo Global Management in 2021, where she is now a managing director.

Speaking to affiliate title Private Debt Investor last year, Casamento said the firm remains “agnostic in terms of sub-strategies within private debt and we look at the whole spectrum, but we are very cautious when it comes to pricing”.

Earlier this year, Tikehau raised a $300 million collateralised fund obligation backed by cashflows from commitments to its direct lending and private debt secondaries strategies.