NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Antoine Dréan, the founder of such innovative companies as Triago, one of the first private placement agents, today announced the next steps in the evolution and development of Mantra Investment Partners, an investor in non-conventional private equity, via primaries, secondaries, directs and GP stakes, and Palico, a digital secondary marketplace that facilitates the buying and selling of smaller private capital fund stakes.
Following last week’s sale of Triago to Houlihan Lokey Private Funds Group, Dréan is shifting his attention to Mantra and Palico to further the advance of private markets by offering innovative strategies and solutions for high-net worth individuals, family offices, endowments, foundations, and other institutional investors.
“I’m excited to focus my energies on Mantra as we seek bold new strategies in the private markets,” said Dréan, who assumes a new role as Mantra’s Chief Investment Officer. “Mantra is exceptionally well positioned to seize on many exciting new and overlooked opportunities across the ever-evolving financial markets. We believe Mantra has cracked the code for LPs seeking an alternative to traditional PE investments, which have become highly correlated to the public markets, weighed down by leverage, exposed to interest rate risk, and overly complex.”
He added: “As Chairman Emeritus of Houlihan Lokey Private Funds Group, I am enthusiastic about its future and will do all I can to contribute to the group’s success going forward.”
Formed in 2012, Palico is pioneering the future of private capital secondaries with a digital platform that is bringing valuable innovation and much-needed efficiency to PE secondaries — establishing standards that optimize and facilitate secondary deals and ultimately empower LPs with a versatile tool to manage their portfolios as effectively as possible. Dréan said: “Palico is uniquely designed to automate secondary transactions digitally for smaller private capital fund stakes, filling a critical gap in the market that is currently underserved by existing players.”
Mantra has been successfully generating outsized returns in specialized private equity opportunities and many other unique strategies since 2007. It operates on a global scale, managing third-party capital via specifically tailored funds. Dréan and his proven team now seek to capture the same dynamism and excitement that drove the evolution of the PE industry during its early years by investing alongside market experts in segments that are unique and less correlated and less volatile than traditional strategies. Specialized strategies include litigation finance, digital infrastructure, agribusiness + water, and specialists + operators.
Mantra publishes the proprietary Mantra Niche Private Equity Index, which is constructed by analyzing the internal rate of return (IRR) and multiple on invested capital (MOIC) historical data across 6,000 specialized private equity investments. The Q1 2024 Mantra Niche Private Equity Index shows that 2011 to 2021 vintage Niche Private Equity funds returned an average net IRR of 38% and 2.3x MOIC. Within that universe, smaller funds have outperformed larger funds. Niche Private Equity funds with less than $500 million in assets under management delivered a net IRR of 40% versus 32% for Niche Private Equity funds with $500 million to $2 billion in assets under management.
“Mantra is truly unique as a trusted partner and advisor with the vision, expertise, and capacity to generate pure alpha through a sector agnostic and acyclic approach yielding accelerated realizations for our limited partners,” Dréan said. “Fueling Mantra’s comparative advantage is its proprietary data, deep analysis, network of relationships, and tested insight, which yield a compelling constellation of leverage-free value-creation opportunities across the alternatives universe.”
Dréan will also devote his attention to further developing Palico. He will continue pushing and advocating Palico’s mission as a first-in-class digital secondary marketplace. Palico will increasingly automate the buying and selling of private capital fund stakes on the secondary market for LPs, from end to end, while also being conscious of GP needs.
About Antoine Dréan
Antoine Dréan is a leading innovator in the global private equity markets. In 1992, Dréan founded Triago, one of the first independent placement agents in private equity, which was recently acquired by Houlihan Lokey. He is also the founder of Mantra Investment Partners and Palico. A French national, Dréan started his career in 1986 at a French advisory firm specializing in distressed situations. In 1988, he founded an M&A boutique which he sold to an American investment bank in 1990. He holds an MBA from the Wharton School (WG ’92), where he was a Board Member from 2010 to 2020.
About Mantra Investment Partners
Mantra Investment Partners seeks to deliver outsized returns for its clients by investing alongside market experts in private equity segments that are less correlated and less volatile than traditional strategies. The firm recognizes the challenges posed by a changing private equity landscape as traditional strategies become saturated and returns decline. Mantra’s mission is to find new pockets of inefficiency and over-performance through relentless research and relationship building. The firm was founded in 2007 by Antoine Dréan, Jean-François Borde and David Hersh.
About Palico
Palico is the leading online marketplace for buying and selling smaller private capital fund stakes having built a bespoke online tool that standardizes and streamlines this process for investors looking to buy and sell positions across all strategies and regions.
