GS Growth, a unit of Goldman Sachs that buys stakes in startup firms, has spent the past few months wooing outside investors, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday (May 20).
The group’s first client fund, West Street Global Growth Partners, raised more than $3 billion earlier this month. Sources tell the Journal that money will be invested in “fast-growing closely held companies in the financial-technology, business-software, consumer and healthcare sectors.”
Other recent investments for the fund include the U.K.’s Starling Bank Ltd.; Swiggy, a food delivery startup out of India; and Comply Advantage, which provides regulation technology.
With endowments and other investors looking to get in on young companies with the potential to provide higher returns, the demand could be substantial, the news outlet noted. For its part, Goldman would like “the steadier revenue streams that come from earning management fees on clients’ money,” per the report.
Growth equity, the asset class GS Growth is focusing on, includes startups that are not ready to go public but have fast-growing customer bases and revenue. These types of assets are popular among investors these days, with upwards of $200 billion going into growth equity funds in the past two years, the Journal says.
This news comes following a quarter that was record-setting period for startup funding. Investors put more than $72 billion into tech startups’ growth-stage rounds, the highest total in the history of that data set. Funding for Q1 of this year was almost double the total from a year ago, with investments growing 57 percent from the previous quarter and more than 194 funding rounds of more than $1 billion.
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