Unigestion further strengthens its global secondaries franchise with three hires

Unigestion, the global boutique asset manager specialising in seeking out tomorrow’s private equity champions, has grown its global secondaries team with additional appointments in London and New York.

Nick Kavanagh, who has 13 years’ experience in private equity, has joined Unigestion as Principal. Based in London, he focuses on sourcing, structuring and executing mid-market secondary transactions. He started his secondaries career at Pantheon Ventures and previously worked for Hamilton Lane for close to seven years, most recently as Principal. During this period he successfully invested into multiple secondary and direct equity transactions in both Europe and the US, including numerous GP-led and direct secondaries.

Unigestion, which pioneered secondaries investments in 2000, has also appointed Satsheel Redkar and Jin Young Kim to its US secondaries team. Satsheel has joined Unigestion as Vice President from Coller Capital, where he worked for three years as a Senior Associate, Secondaries Private Equity and Co-investments. He previously worked for Advent International and Boston Consulting Group. Jin has joined Unigestion’s New York office as an Associate, having previously worked for over four years as an Associate focused on secondaries at Manulife Investment Management.

These three additional hires follow the appointment of London-based secondaries specialist Jordan Dimmock.

Unigestion’s private equity team, which comprises over 70 private equity professionals, has more than 20 years’ experience in secondaries and is one of the most established players in the mid-market. The team focused on secondaries closes, on average, up to two secondaries transactions per month. In total Unigestion has executed over 300 secondaries transactions.

Unigestion employs a ‘Triple Alpha’ approach to private equity investment, focusing on delivering theme-driven alpha, mid-market alpha and selection alpha, to achieve premium returns across all strategies and throughout the cycle. Its secondaries strategy focuses on building global portfolios of companies across seven themes with the potential to be the champions of tomorrow, with a focus on attractive cashflow profiles, leading to consistent, unlevered returns for investors with low loss ratios.

The secondaries team, headed by Ralph Büchel, firmly believes in striking a careful balance with diversification while focusing on high quality assets and concentrated portfolios to reduce tail-end risk for investors. The sixth vintage of Unigestion’s secondaries strategy already has a highly attractive seed portfolio and applies the same proven fusion strategy of GP-led, LP-stake and direct secondaries as its predecessor fund, with a balanced split between North America and Europe.

Ralph Büchel, Private Equity Partner and Global Head of Secondaries at Unigestion, said: “We are delighted to welcome Nick, Jin and Satsheel to Unigestion. They each have exceptional and complementary capabilities in secondaries and, together with the broader team, will add significant value as we build out the sixth vintage of our secondaries strategy and seek to deliver first quartile returns for our investors.”

Mark Zünd, Head of Private Equity at Unigestion, said: “Investors are becoming increasingly aware of the compelling investment opportunities available from secondaries, particularly in the mid-market. We have honed our secondaries expertise and proven ability to generate alpha returns across cycles in the past 24 years. With an outcome-focused investment strategy that leverages our primary platform  and direct investment underwriting skills, we have a track record of delivering consistent returns for our investors.”