India Value Fund rebranded as True North

Private equity firm has set a target to increase its deployment five fold in the next 15 years

India Value Fund Advisors Pvt. Ltd. (IVFA), a homegrown PE firm, today unveiled its new brand identity True North. The PE firm, which has set a target to increase its deployment by five times in the next 15 years, has also decided to realign its sector focus. The new brand was unveiled in the presence of tennis player Andre Agassi today.

Vishal Nevatia, managing partner, True North said that IVFA was formed around 17 years ago, with an unique model, combining the business nurturing skill of a conglomerate, with a sharpness and focus of a PE fund.

This strategy worked well as IVFA has worked with over 30 businesses and invested over Rs 8,000 crores of equity capital. These businesses were able to grow revenues and EBITDA at 25 per cent and 20 per cent respectively, during their partnership with the firm. Since inception, the firm has created 45,000 new jobs and generated Rs 12,000 crore and Rs 1,600 crore in incremental sales & EBITDA respectively.

The re-branding thought came after IVFA got feedback from various stakeholders that the brand doesn't reflect its model.

"Our single most important thing is commitment to values, while strategy and other things can change, and that is want to communicate through this re-branding," said Nevatia. True North will help to find people North and aspiration in a right way, he added.

True North has also set a long term vision, which is to increase, what it is did in the last 15 years by atleast five times in the next 15 years, said Nevatia.

The firm has now restructured its business and investment management teams as per sector specialisations. In the last 17 years the main focus has been healthcare, financial services and consumer, while in the recent times it added technology product services where it has very little experience.

Going forward the company plans to commit atleast 80-90 per cent of its capital in these sectors, while the balance will spread across.

The fund has a combined corpus of over $2 billion across five independent funds and is currently investing out of Fund V, which has a corpus of $ 700 million.

Each sector will be led by one partner from the investment division and one partner from the business management division, who are largely CEOs and Managing Directors of companies.

The partners include Ajay Bakshi, MD & CEO Manipal Health Enterprise, Akash Malik of Cloudnine, Bala Malladi, CEO of ACT, Amit Garg CEO of InLogistics and others.

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Fact Box

Years in operation : 17

Investment vehicles : 5 independent investment funds

Indian businesses : 30

Combined corpus: $2 billion

International Institutional investors