Fundraising

Whitehorse closes fourth fund in six years

The preferred equity specialist has raised $7.5bn and grown its headcount to 85 since it was founded in 2015.

By
Rod James
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Whitehorse Liquidity Partners has held the final close on its fourth flagship fund after around a year in market.

The Toronto-headquartered preferred equity specialist has hit the $4 billion hard-cap for Whitehorse Liquidity Partners IV in an oversubscribed fundraise, according to a statement. The fund was targeting $3 billion.

Kirkland & Ellis and Goodmans provided legal counsel on the fundraise.

“In a year that challenged us all, we are grateful for how our investors adapted to a virtual world”, said Yann Robard, managing partner and founder of Whitehorse. “We are also proud of how the Whitehorse team mobilised from a fundraising, deal doing and team building perspective.”

The fund received commitments from 112 investors including insurance companies, pensions funds, family offices, financial institutions and individuals, added partner Michael Gubbels.

Limited partners include Maryland State Retirement and Pension System, Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System and Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System, each of which committed $200 million, according to Secondaries Investor data.

Predecessor Fund III held final close on its $2 billion hard-cap in 2019,  Secondaries Investor reported.

The Toronto-headquartered preferred equity provider has four pillars to its investment thesis, Secondaries Investor reported in June.

It can provide preferred equity to allow LPs to generate liquidity from their portfolios without having to sell; purchase portfolios outright, split them into preferred- and common-equity tranches and syndicate the common equity; offer fund-level liquidity to GPs to invest in portfolio companies; and inject liquidity into GP management companies.

The firm deployed $3 billion pre-syndication in 2020, making for its largest ever deployment year, partner Giorgio Riva said in the statement.

Whitehorse has raised $7.5 billion, deployed more than $6.3 billion and grown to 85 professionals since its founding in 2015.

In April, Robard told Secondaries Investor that the secondaries market has “the potential to grow to $1 trillion or more” in annual volume by 2030: “If you can believe that private capital grows at 10 percent a year to 2030 and that 5 percent of private capital AUM trades in any one year, you get there.”