Aquilius closes debut Asia secondaries fund on $400m

It coincides with the raising of USD 200m for co-investment held in separately managed accounts. LPs include sovereign wealth funds, endowments, and family offices.

Aquilius was established by Bastian Wolff, who worked at Partners Group for 15 years where he was the head of private real estate in Asia, and Christian Keiber, who spent nine years at Blackstone, latterly as a managing director covering Southeast Asia and Australia private equity.

The director of investments is Vincent Sadlak, a founding member of Blackstone’s Tactical Opportunities Asia unit. 

Aquilius claims capabilities spanning LP fund transfer, GP-led, and direct secondary transactions. The team is said to have executed more than USD 2bn in private market transactions to date.

The plan is to offer differentiated, lower-risk access to Asian private markets by targeting traditional and non-traditional secondaries transactions. The firm said the fund has already made investments across a “comprehensive” set of secondary solutions, including the recapitalisation of closed-ended funds and joint ventures.

Much of the thesis is based on the observation that Asia represents a fast-growing but still largely untapped secondaries market. This opportunity set is expected to increasingly include complex GP-led transactions in light of weaker exit markets and an ongoing fundraising slump.

“We are seeing an increasing need for our product, driven by a slowdown in overall exit activity, a significant tail of unrealised NAV [net asset value] across older fund vintages, and a changing regulatory environment,” Wolff (pictured) said in a statement.

“Our approach is focused on solving investors' headaches through flexible, patient, and solutions-oriented capital and our deep local experience and network position us well to do so.”

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Fundraising
• Secondaries
• Asia
• Singapore
• Aquilius Investment Partners
• Secondaries