Alpine Investors completed the fund raising for its ninth fund, hitting its $4.5 billion hard cap in limited partner capital commitments.
Investors in this latest flagship offering are Texas Teachers Retirement System and Los Angeles County Employees Retirement System, among others. The San Francisco private equity firm originally had a $3.75 billion target for the oversubscribed fund. The new fund is approximately double the size of Alpine’s previous fund, Alpine Investors VIII.
“We are thrilled with this outcome, particularly in a very challenging fundraising environment,” said Graham Weaver, founder and CEO of Alpine Investors. “We started Alpine 22 years ago with the thesis that the secret to building companies was hiring and training world-class leaders. It is incredibly satisfying to think that treating people well and giving them opportunities to be their best selves at work has been the formula for our investing success.”
Alpine Investors Fund IX is set to make control buyouts of software and services businesses with total enterprise values of up to $1 billion and focuses on add-on acquisitions for high-performing platform investments. Notable recent investments for the platform have been in ASG, Axcel Learning, Axia Water, FEV Tutor, and Medusind. They have also launched a number of platforms such as predictis, a data-enabled software platform launched in conjunction with the acquisition of AirDNA.
With $15 billion in AUM, Alpine Investors offers CEO-in-Training and CEO-in-Residence programs that employ over 110 CEOs and executive-level roles within its portfolio companies through these talent programs.
Weaver in a recent blog post said that when he started Alpine 22 years ago, the team knew that building great companies required hiring and training world-class leaders. Yet, he said, it wasn’t until year seven in business that it really “clicked” and became the sun around which the firm’s world orbits.
“We realized then that our core business is not actually investing; we are in the talent business,” he wrote.
