ACE & Company: Insights Across Private Markets

At a recent event at La Reserve, ACE shared insights across private markets, focusing on key trends and future outlooks.

Sherif El Halwagy, Head of ACE Secondaries, highlighted that the secondaries industry is structurally still in its early innings of growth. A significant amount of NAV from funds 10 years old and older still remains unrealized. Traditional capital pools, such as capital markets, strategic acquirers, and PE funds, cannot absorb the volume of private assets, and therefore Secondaries are another “tool in the liquidity toolbox,” which highlights the opportunity for LP-led secondaries investors.

Rob Callahan and Lee Lowicki led an in-depth review of the ACE Buyout strategy. Lee described the power of the team’s network, where over 1,000 annual interactions drive key outcomes in the investment process, from sourcing and analyzing investments to supporting companies in the portfolio. Rob hosted a lively discussion with Mark Grabowski, CEO and Managing Director of Snapdragon Capital Partners, and one of ACE's key emerging manager relationships. Together, they discussed keys to successful investing in the consumer space, as well as two recent ACE co-investments alongside Snapdragon: JECT, an injectibles-focused medical aesthetics spa, and Mathnasium, a child enrichment tutoring franchisee.

Charles Lorenceau and Steve Salom, Co-Heads of ACE Ventures, discussed the power law and its impact on everything ACE Ventures does as early-stage VC investors. He also described our VC model, centered around our team of operators and engineers, as necessary to best identify, get access to, and support the "extreme outlying" founders that we seek to invest in. He then welcomed three of our Outliers on stage: Camillo Werdich, founder and CEO of Sinpex, disrupting the KYC space, as well as Amer Baroudi and Abdallah Abuhashem, founders of nsave, democratizing access to trusted banking and financial services in emerging markets.