Actis closes first dedicated infra fund on $1.23bn – exclusive

Actis, a London-based emerging markets fund manager, has closed its first dedicated infrastructure fund after raising $1.23 billion in commitments.

With co-investments, the Actis Long Life Infrastructure Fund has $2 billion of investable capital, according to a source familiar with the fundraise. ALLIF, which Actis launched in late 2017, originally targeted $2 billion, but the firm lowered that amount to $1.5 billion in January to allow for more co-investment opportunities.

Actis received commitments from institutional investors in North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. According to public pension documents, known commitments to ALLIF include $93.3 million from the Employees Retirement System of Texas and $75 million from the South Carolina Retirement System. Ticket sizes committed to the fund ranged between $50 million and $200 million, and the firm offered LPs a 15-basis-point fee reduction for commitments made before a first close, held in May 2018, a source familiar with the fundraise told Infrastructure Investor.

The fund is a strategy shift for the emerging markets specialist, which has raised a suite of energy-focused funds that have built platform companies in Latin America, Africa and South-East Asia. Actis has committed more than $5 billion to develop assets generating a combined 25GW. Its most recent energy fund, Actis Energy IV, closed on $2.75 billion in March 2017.

The firm has described ALLIF as a “complementary strategy” to its energy funds and pitched the vehicle as an opportunity for LPs to gain exposure to low-risk assets in markets that aren’t as risky as previously perceived. ALLIF has a 15-year lifespan and will invest in operating power, transmission, generation and distribution assets.

“ALLIF provides an attractive risk reward profile to invest longer term in a sector and in markets that we know extremely well,” Torbjorn Caesar, a senior partner at Actis, said in a statement. “It is entirely complementary to the experience and reputation we have amassed in our existing energy business.”

Actis has a pipeline of around $8 billion of assets being considered for investment. The first two commitments from ALLIF were the acquisition of a 100MW solar project in Chile which sells power to the Santiago Metro transit system, and 137MW of operational wind assets in Brazil.

ALLIF is led by Glen Matsumoto, a partner at Actis and head of infrastructure, who joined the firm in 2016 after helping launch an infrastructure programme at Swedish private equity firm EQT Partners.