Northstar's Ashish Shastry to join KKR

The impending move comes less than a year after Northstar closed its fourth fund at $810 million. The firm's VC unit, NSI Ventures, announced a final close of $89 million on its debut vehicle at the same time.

Northstar was founded by Patrick Walujo and Glenn Sugita in 2003 and TPG Capital was a significant LP in its first two funds and a frequent co-investor. Shastry, who joined TPG in 1998, had risen to the rank of partner and head of Southeast Asia by 2011 when TPG acquired a minority stake in Northstar, which in turn received a smaller percentage interest in TPG. Shastry moved over as part of the arrangement.

Northstar subsequently closed its third fund at $820 million. Shastry is said to have played a key role in the GP exploring a wider geographic remit, which led to several investments outside of Indonesia. Fund IV follows a similar strategy to its predecessor, with 70% of the corpus earmarked for deployment in Indonesia and the rest in other Southeast Asian markets.

KKR opened an office in Singapore four years ago to serve as a base for investment activities across Southeast Asia. It had already participated in buyouts involving several Singapore-headquartered companies and entered Vietnam. Activity has since widened to include other markets. This year the firm announced its first two private equity deals in Indonesia, buying minority stakes in agri-food business Japfa Comfeed and ride-hailing and delivery platform Go-Jek. The latter is also a Northstar portfolio company.

KKR closed its second pan-Asian fund at $6 billion in mid-2013. It is expected to launch Fund III towards the end of this year, targeting between $6 billion and $7 billion.

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• People
• Buyout
• KKR
• Northstar Group
• Appointments