Paul Hudson’s Glade Brook Capital Partners, a Tiger Grandcub, has launched two new funds designed to make targeted private investments.
The Greenwich, Connecticut, firm said it raised nearly $190 million for Glade Brook Private Opportunities Fund and another $60 million or so for Glade Brook Private Investors IV, according to two separate regulatory filings.
Hudson is a former managing director at Chris Shumway’s Shumway Capital Partners — Shumway himself is a Tiger Cub. At Shumway, Hudson led the firm’s private investment in Facebook in January 2011, before its initial public offering. Hudson then went on to form Glade Brook.
At the beginning of the year, Glade Brook had about $1.4 billion under management; $755 million of that was invested in private investments, according to a private document obtained by Alpha.
Most of Glade Brook’s fundraising for private investments has come since the start of 2014.
The firm declined to comment.
According to an offering document obtained by Alpha, Glade Brook Private Opportunities Fund will focus on four to six “big global ideas” over the next 24 months. It plans to hold each of the investments for one to four years and anticipates cashing out either when the company goes public in an IPO or is sold.
The fund’s life is expected to be five years, although there could be two one-year extensions.
The minimum investment is $1 million. The fund is charging a 1.75 percent management fee and a 20 percent incentive fee over an 8 percent internal rate of return (IRR).
So far, two Glade Brook investments have been placed into the fund — Uber Technologies, the ride-sharing service, and Snapchat, the messaging company whose founders turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook, according to a knowledgeable source.
Glade Brook Private Investors IV, meanwhile, is a separate fund created to invest in just Snapchat, according to the source.
Glade Brook already has several private funds. Glade Brook Private Investors has raised more than $195 million in three separate series since 2012 and was formed to invest in Alibaba Group Holding. Its assets under management currently exceed $429 million for a net IRR of more than 95 percent, according to the firm’s document.
Alibaba went public in late September 2014. Glade Brook’s three classes purchased shares of the stock at an average of $15.50, $56 and $59.19 per share. The company went public at $68 per share and closed Friday at $84.58.
In January 2014, Glade Brook raised $126.7 million for Glade Brook Private Investors II, which was formed to invest in Broadcasting Media Partners, the parent company of Univision Communications, the Spanish-language media company. Broadcast Media is currently worth about $142 million, according to the document.
In March the Wall Street Journal reported that Univision selected three investment banks for a planned $1 billion IPO, which would value the company at somewhere between $15 billion and $20 billion.
In November 2014, Glade Brook raised more than $50 million for Private Investors III, which was created to invest in Koudai Corp. The investment firm describes Koudai as “one of the fastest-growing mobile e-commerce companies” in China. Its businesses include YouShop, which Glade Brook says allows merchants to create online stores with smartphones or tablets, and Koudai, “a desktop and mobile-landing page” with product recommendations and reviews.
As we reported at the time, in December 2014, Glade Brook raised $141.5 million for Glade Brook Private Investors V, formed to invest in Uber. Glade Brook anticipates an IPO in 2016 for Uber.
Glade Brook’s aggressive move into private investments comes as its hedge funds have hit a speed bump. In 2014, the Glade Brook Global Domestic Fund and the Glade Brook Global Offshore Fund, the firm’s core hedge funds, lost 1.3 percent.
