Apis Partners, a London-headquartered private equity firm that counts edtech startup Leap, insure-tech company RenewBuy and non-bank lender Hero Fincorp in its India portfolio, has closed its third fund after collecting double the corpus of its predecessor.
The PE firm raised $1.23 billion for Apis Global Growth Fund III and Apis Growth Markets Fund III, excluding co-investment commitments, it said in a statement.
The two vehicles, collectively its third fund, closed 23% above the PE firm’s initial target. About 70% of its existing limited partners committed to half of the corpus, Apis said.
The PE firm’s assets under management now stand at $2.3 billion.
The new fund will invest in tech-enabled financial infrastructure and services companies across Europe and growth markets. Its focus is on high growth, profitable financial infrastructure and services businesses in these regions.
“We continue to see opportunities in our target segment of profitable, high growth, tech-enabled financial infrastructure and services companies,” said Matteo Stefanel, Apis co-founder and managing partner. “We are well on our way to replicating the success of previous funds, by leveraging our experience in this sector and bringing capital and connectivity to our portfolio companies as we invest in the conduits to global economic activity, the pipes of the finance industry.”
The new fund has already invested $400 million across seven companies. These include the UK’s digital wealth management firm MoneyBox, European and Asian platform for prepaid digital goods Coda Recharge, and digital payments infrastructure provider Thunes.
“We look forward to continuing to invest in our key themes of embedded finance, democratisation of finance and the deepening of the digital economy through capital-light, high growth disruptive business models around the world whilst applying our proprietary impact methodology,” said Udayan Goyal, Apis co-founder and managing partner.
The PE firm hit the road for the third fund in early 2023. It received commitments worth $563 million for its second vehicle that closed in 2019, after exceeding the target of $400 million.
Apis Partners said its funds have generated in excess of $1 billion in realisations to date, aided by recent exits from iKhokha and Baobab to Nedbank and Beltone Capital respectively.
