Leading Private Equity Innovator Antoine Dréan Announces Next Steps to Accelerate Growth in Private Markets Amid Pivotal Shifts
May 13 2024 - 9:15AM
Business Wire
Following sale of Triago, Dréan launches
expansion of Mantra’s nonconventional investment strategies and
Palico’s digital marketplace for PE secondaries
- Dréan takes on new role as Chief Investment Officer of Mantra
Investment Partners
- Broadens and enhances Palico’s revolutionary digital
marketplace that facilitates the buying and selling of private
capital fund stakes
- Named Chairman Emeritus of Houlihan Lokey Private Funds
Group
Antoine Dréan, the founder of such innovative companies as
Triago, one of the first private placement agents, today announced
the next steps in the evolution and development of Mantra
Investment Partners, an investor in non-conventional private
equity, via primaries, secondaries, directs and GP stakes, and
Palico, a digital secondary marketplace that facilitates the buying
and selling of smaller private capital fund stakes.
This press release features multimedia. View
the full release here:
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240513341200/en/
Following last week’s sale of Triago to Houlihan Lokey Private
Funds Group, Dréan is shifting his attention to Mantra and Palico
to further the advance of private markets by offering innovative
strategies and solutions for high-net worth individuals, family
offices, endowments, foundations, and other institutional
investors.
“I’m excited to focus my energies on Mantra as we seek bold new
strategies in the private markets,” said Dréan, who assumes a new
role as Mantra’s Chief Investment Officer. “Mantra is exceptionally
well positioned to seize on many exciting new and overlooked
opportunities across the ever-evolving financial markets. We
believe Mantra has cracked the code for LPs seeking an alternative
to traditional PE investments, which have become highly correlated
to the public markets, weighed down by leverage, exposed to
interest rate risk, and overly complex.”
He added: “As Chairman Emeritus of Houlihan Lokey Private Funds
Group, I am enthusiastic about its future and will do all I can to
contribute to the group’s success going forward.”
Formed in 2012, Palico is pioneering the future of private
capital secondaries with a digital platform that is bringing
valuable innovation and much-needed efficiency to PE secondaries —
establishing standards that optimize and facilitate secondary deals
and ultimately empower LPs with a versatile tool to manage their
portfolios as effectively as possible. Dréan said: “Palico is
uniquely designed to automate secondary transactions digitally for
smaller private capital fund stakes, filling a critical gap in the
market that is currently underserved by existing players.”
Mantra has been successfully generating outsized returns in
specialized private equity opportunities and many other unique
strategies since 2007. It operates on a global scale, managing
third-party capital via specifically tailored funds. Dréan and his
proven team now seek to capture the same dynamism and excitement
that drove the evolution of the PE industry during its early years
by investing alongside market experts in segments that are unique
and less correlated and less volatile than traditional strategies.
Specialized strategies include litigation finance, digital
infrastructure, agribusiness + water, and specialists +
operators.
Mantra publishes the proprietary Mantra Niche Private Equity
Index, which is constructed by analyzing the internal rate of
return (IRR) and multiple on invested capital (MOIC) historical
data across 6,000 specialized private equity investments. The Q1
2024 Mantra Niche Private Equity Index shows that 2011 to 2021
vintage Niche Private Equity funds returned an average net IRR of
38% and 2.3x MOIC. Within that universe, smaller funds have
outperformed larger funds. Niche Private Equity funds with less
than $500 million in assets under management delivered a net IRR of
40% versus 32% for Niche Private Equity funds with $500 million to
$2 billion in assets under management.
“Mantra is truly unique as a trusted partner and advisor with
the vision, expertise, and capacity to generate pure alpha through
a sector agnostic and acyclic approach yielding accelerated
realizations for our limited partners,” Dréan said. “Fueling
Mantra’s comparative advantage is its proprietary data, deep
analysis, network of relationships, and tested insight, which yield
a compelling constellation of leverage-free value-creation
opportunities across the alternatives universe.”
Dréan will also devote his attention to further developing
Palico. He will continue pushing and advocating Palico’s mission as
a first-in-class digital secondary marketplace. Palico will
increasingly automate the buying and selling of private capital
fund stakes on the secondary market for LPs, from end to end, while
also being conscious of GP needs.
About Antoine Dréan
Antoine Dréan is a leading innovator in the global private
equity markets. In 1992, Dréan founded Triago, one of the first
independent placement agents in private equity, which was recently
acquired by Houlihan Lokey. He is also the founder of Mantra
Investment Partners and Palico. A French national, Dréan started
his career in 1986 at a French advisory firm specializing in
distressed situations. In 1988, he founded an M&A boutique
which he sold to an American investment bank in 1990. He holds an
MBA from the Wharton School (WG ’92), where he was a Board Member
from 2010 to 2020.
About Mantra Investment Partners
Mantra Investment Partners seeks to deliver outsized returns for
its clients by investing alongside market experts in private equity
segments that are less correlated and less volatile than
traditional strategies. The firm recognizes the challenges posed by
a changing private equity landscape as traditional strategies
become saturated and returns decline. Mantra’s mission is to find
new pockets of inefficiency and over-performance through relentless
research and relationship building. The firm was founded in 2007 by
Antoine Dréan, Jean-François Borde and David Hersh.
About Palico
Palico is the leading online marketplace for buying and selling
smaller private capital fund stakes having built a bespoke online
tool that standardizes and streamlines this process for investors
looking to buy and sell positions across all strategies and
regions.
View source
version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240513341200/en/
Media: RUBENSTEIN Carolyn Sargent csargent@rubenstein.com
917-838-8514