Hollyport Capital (HC), a leading private equity secondaries manager, rebranded by Dusted, has held the final close of its latest secondaries fund after less than one year in the market.
The London and New York based tail-end secondaries specialist has hit the $1bn hard-cap for Hollyport Secondary Opportunities Fund VII, which is double the amount raised for the 2017 vintage fund VI, PEI Secondaries Investor reported this week.
Preparing a brand for fund raising
With a buoyant secondaries market outlook, sustained growth and imminent expansion plans including a New York office opening, Hollyport set a target of $750m for Fund VII opening Jan 2019. To help achieve this goal HC wanted to modernise their branding/ investor relations comms and create a rebranded central purpose that would resonate with sophisticated global institutional LPs and align with their future business strategy.
After a successful pitch process, Dusted were appointed to deliver a strategic branding and communications process including a refreshed brand, corporate communications suite, presentation and fully optimised responsive website with CMS.
Tried and trusted financial branding team
Due to a specialist focus in finance branding and the highly nuanced alternative and private equity space, Dusted quickly understood their goals and could tap into the branding team’s depth secondaries experience having worked with Coller Capital, PEI Group and other leading PE related firms.
We helped the Hollyport management team answer the ‘why Hollyport?’ question after identifying current stakeholder perceptions and needs across the sector; defining what values and attributes have contributed to their success to-date; and finally what really sets them apart in the high growth and fairly complex secondaries investment market.
A key part of the brand strategy brief (alongside existing fund raise activity) was to help engage investors who were largely institutional and multi-jurisdictional, more so than previous funds, with limited partners from the Middle East, Asia and the US. While also modernising the brand purpose, visual identity, mobile website and digital marketing capabilities en route – now a central requirement of any specialist investment business and investor relations team.
Secondaries growth set to continue in 2020
With the $1bn fund VII close, Hollyport has doubled each fund size since it’s debut raise back in 2006 ($7.9m) and with a carefully considered brand strategy to create a wider international LP reach as strategic secondary deals become a key tool for PE managers and institutional investors.
Hollyport Secondary Opportunities Fund VII is the first Secondaries fund in 2020 to hold a final close, PEI Secondaries Investor reported, with secondaries funds raising $34bn in 2019 they are certainly ‘raising the bar’ in the alternatives space with the secondaries sector projected to globally raise a further $45bn+ in 2020.