Capital Formation
Allocators commit to a record they can verify.
We advise general partners raising institutional capital, from a first fund to a successor vehicle, or a continuation vehicle for an asset the sponsor intends to hold past the fund's term. The work begins with what can be proven about the record, because that is the part of the deck an allocator reads first and the part a weak process leaves unsubstantiated.
Positioning
A fundraise is a diligence exercise that happens to end in a close.
An allocator's first question is not whether the strategy is sound. It is whether this team, in this market, produced the returns it is showing, and whether the attribution behind them survives being taken apart. A deck that leads with the thesis and treats the record as an appendix inverts the order in which it will actually be read.
The second question is what makes the vehicle different from the others in the queue, and it is rarely the strategy. It is usually sourcing, sector depth, an operating capability, or a structure that solves a problem the LP has. Work that out before outreach and the process is a sequence of qualified conversations. Skip it and the fund joins a long list competing on terms.
Coverage
The vehicles we advise on.
Each draws a different investor base and is diligenced on a different question. The structure is part of the pitch, not an administrative detail behind it.
First-time funds
Debut institutional vehicles, where the record has to be reconstructed and attributed from work done elsewhere before it can carry a raise.
Successor funds
Follow-on vehicles, positioned against the realized and unrealized performance of the predecessor and the questions the existing investor base will ask first.
Continuation vehicles
Single-asset and multi-asset vehicles for positions held past the fund's horizon, where the same sponsor stands on both sides and the process has to answer for it.
Co-investment sidecars
Deal-by-deal and programmatic co-invest capital raised alongside a fund, including the governance that decides how opportunities are allocated.
Managed accounts and funds of one
Single-investor mandates for an institution that wants the strategy with its own terms, fees, reporting and consent rights.
Institutional evergreen and open-ended vehicles
Structures raised from institutions that take periodic subscriptions and offer limited, often gated, redemptions, where the valuation policy and the liquidity terms are the substance of the diligence.
Process
How a raise runs.
The nine-phase mandate lifecycle applies here as it does to a transaction, with one difference: a fundraise has no single counterparty and no exclusivity, so the discipline sits in sequencing the investor base and keeping the diligence ahead of the questions.
Phase 01
Track record and attribution
Before anything is written: establish what can be evidenced. Deal-by-deal attribution naming who did what, gross and net returns reconciled to cash flows rather than to a prior employer's marketing, realized separated from unrealized, loss ratios shown rather than omitted, and valuation policy stated for everything still held. Where a number came from work done at a previous firm, it is labelled as such. Anything that cannot be walked back to source is marked as unverified, and any deal left out of the record is listed with the reason.
Phase 02
Positioning and strategy articulation
What the vehicle does that the alternatives do not, written so a skeptical allocator can test it: where deals come from, why this team sees them first, what happens to a company after the investment, and which part of the return is attributable to the manager rather than to the market the fund happened to be raised into.
Phase 03
Materials and the diligence set
The deck, the private placement memorandum with counsel, the model and the track-record workbook, and a due diligence questionnaire built on the ILPA due diligence questionnaire institutions already use rather than a format of our own. The data room opens with the process, not with the first request: policies, team biographies, financials, references and the governance documents an institution will ask for whether or not they are offered.
Phase 04
Investor mapping and sequencing
Most allocators' constraints can be established before the first call: strategy, geography, vehicle type, typical commitment size, and whether they back first-time managers at all. Most of a long list was never eligible. The list is tiered by fit and ordered so that the institutions most likely to anchor come first, because an anchor changes every conversation that follows it. Fit is established as the list is built, not after.
Phase 05
Diligence, terms and the close
Operational due diligence runs in parallel with investment diligence and can stop an allocation the investment team has already approved. We prepare the terms position and the analysis behind it, with counsel: management fee and offset, carry and hurdle, the waterfall, key-person and no-fault provisions, advisory committee composition, and the side letters that follow. A first close is prepared as a milestone the later investors will diligence.
Track-record substantiation
Attribution, realizations and loss ratios, substantiated before an allocator asks.
An allocator underwrites the record first. Our work is making it verifiable, including the parts that are unflattering.
Deal-by-deal attribution that names the individuals responsible, so a team's record is not inherited wholesale from a platform it worked inside.
Gross and net returns reconciled to underlying cash flows, with the fee and expense assumptions behind the net figures stated.
Realized and unrealized performance separated, and the valuation policy for every remaining position written down rather than implied.
Loss ratios and the write-offs behind them presented with the rest, because an allocator who finds them in diligence discounts everything else that was not volunteered.
Returns attributable to the manager distinguished from returns attributable to entry timing, leverage and the market, since a sophisticated LP performs that separation regardless.
Performance from prior firms labelled as predecessor work, with the role and the mandate at the time described.
Every number in the fundraising materials is walked back to source, and anything that cannot be is marked as unverified.
Where we work
Strategies we work across.
We work across private equity, private credit, real assets and infrastructure, energy and the energy transition, and venture. We take a mandate where the record can be substantiated and the strategy can be defended to the investor being asked to fund it.
Questions
Before you appoint anyone.
Can a first-time manager raise institutional capital?
Yes, but on different evidence. A debut vehicle has no fund-level record, so the raise stands on attributed deal-level performance from wherever the team did the work, on a team that has invested together rather than met to raise a fund, and usually on an anchor investor or a seeded portfolio that gives later investors something to diligence. The part that takes longest is attribution: establishing, in a form a prior employer will not dispute, who was responsible for which outcome. That work should start well before any investor conversation.
What actually causes a raise to stall?
Often operational rather than investment diligence. Valuation policy that cannot be explained, a service-provider set an institution will not accept, governance that concentrates discretion without check, missing policies, or a record whose attribution does not survive a reference call. After that: a strategy whose returns are plainly explained by entry timing or leverage, and a first close that never arrives, because allocators read a stalled raise as information. Naming the weaknesses first is what makes the rest of the pitch credible.
How does a continuation vehicle avoid the conflict in it?
By process, disclosed. The sponsor is on both sides of the trade, as manager of the selling fund and of the buying vehicle, so the answer has to be structural: price set by a lead investor through a competitive process, independent valuation or fairness work, a real choice for existing investors to sell, roll, or where offered keep their position on existing terms, advisory committee consent on the terms, and full disclosure of what the sponsor and the deal team receive on each side. A continuation vehicle that cannot show those steps is a transfer between the manager's own vehicles, and investors treat it that way.
What is in an institutional diligence set, and when should it exist?
The questionnaire, the track-record workbook reconciled to cash flows, the governing documents, audited financials, the valuation policy, the compliance and conflicts policies, information-security and business-continuity material, service-provider details and references, including references from investments that did not work. It should exist before outreach begins, not be assembled in response to the first request. Allocators read the speed and completeness of the answer as a signal about how the fund itself will be run.
Transaction credentials available upon request.
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