InfraVia sails past €400m target

Roughly one year after reaching a first close of €150 million, French fund manager OFI InfraVia has sailed past its original €400 million fundraising target for its second infrastructure fund, Infrastructure Investor can exclusively reveal.

InfraVia II is now on track to close during the fourth quarter of this year on between €500 million and €600 million. If it were to close on €600 million, Fund II would end up being more than three times bigger than InfraVia’s first infrastructure vehicle, which raised just under €200 million in 2008 and is now fully invested.

Sources said InfraVia will not seek to close Fund II on more than €600 million, as that would require it to change its current mid-cap investment strategy. With Fund II, InfraVia is also seeking to internationalise its investor base, targeting about a third of commitments from non-French limited partners.

In a February interview with Infrastructure Investor, Vincent Levita, president of OFI InfraVia, argued that the mid-cap space provided some competitive advantages:

“We are seeing the development of the infrastructure asset class with large global funds and large investors going direct, which is making the large-cap space very competitive. Of course, there are other funds operating in our space. There are three of four people with the same vision as us, but the competition doesn’t drive us to places where we don’t want to go – which nowadays is our concern with large cap.”

InfraVia has been actively investing Fund II. In early July, the fund manager was the lead sponsor in a consortium that reached financial close on a €170 million infrastructure project in the Hauts-de-Seine department of France, which involves the creation of a cultural centre dedicated to music. That deal was also notable for being financed with €157 million from Allianz Global Investors.

In late May, InfraVia purchased a 25 percent stake in Germany’s A8 road, a brownfield asset.

The fund manager is targeting primarily brownfield assets in the energy – excluding renewables, for the moment – transportation, and telecommunications sectors. It has a small pocket reserved for greenfield public-private partnership projects, like the recently closed French cultural centre project.