Lawrence Calcano, chief executive of iCapital - iCapital An early mover in the effort to open up private markets to individuals is now reaping the benefits of the industry’s push into the mainstream.
iCapital, a provider of private-markets financial technology for wealth advisers, has raised more than $820 million in a deal that values it at more than $7.5 billion, the company said. It was last valued at about $6 billion in 2022, according to PitchBook.
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Asset-manager T. Rowe Price and investment firm SurgoCap Partners led the new investment. iCapital, which has been profitable since 2019, plans to use the proceeds to do more acquisitions and expand its business globally, according to Chief Executive Lawrence Calcano.
“We believe we can create a marketplace and an infrastructure for people to buy and sell a complicated range of assets in their portfolio,” he said. “The new investors see that opportunity and view it as both a strategic one and a financial one.”
Private-equity firms are increasingly looking to wealthy individuals as growth from institutional investors such as pension funds and endowments levels off. Wealthy individuals, typically via financial advisers, are expected to increase their allocations to private markets to more than $20 trillion by 2030, up from $13 trillion today, BlackRock estimates.
iCapital was founded in 2013 to help independent wealth advisers get access to private markets. Its first set of offerings were feeder funds, which pooled commitments from wealthy individuals and invested them in private-equity funds. iCapital now also offers investments in funds specifically structured for individuals and has expanded to areas like credit, real estate and infrastructure. It has $945 billion in transaction volume on its platform and 114,000 users.
The company’s roster of existing investors is a who’s-who of the asset-management world, including Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase. It is considered a likely candidate for an eventual initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter.
iCapital has done 23 acquisitions, doubling its employee base in recent years to more than 1,800. It has 16 offices around the world.
Write to Miriam Gottfried at [email protected]
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