BackPadmanabh Sinha joins NIIF to lead its direct PE vehicle
Padmanabh Sinha will lead the NIIF SOF, with a target corpus of more than $2 billion
PremiumPadmanabh Sinha, former managing partner at Tata Opportunities Fund, has joined the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF) as executive director and chief investment officer of its direct private equity vehicle.
Sinha will lead the NIIF Strategic Opportunities Fund (SOF), one of the largest funds focused on India with a target corpus of more than $2 billion.
While the SOF is currently in its fundraise mode, it has raised a substantial portion of the corpus and also made a few investments.
India’s sovereign wealth fund NIIF manages over $4.5 billion of equity capital commitments across its three funds—Master Fund, Fund of Funds and SOF.
“I am delighted to join and help build out NIIF as a global best-in-class sovereign-linked investment institution and contribute to India’s growth trajectory alongside. Given NIIF’s (and its private equity platform’s) scale, stakeholders and networks, the SOF can play a unique role in providing long-term growth capital to many companies in India while achieving attractive risk-adjusted returns for its Indian and global investors," said Sinha.
Sinha is joining NIIF after a brief entrepreneurship stint wherein he had floated a growth-stage private equity firm, LaunchBay Capital, late last year. He set up the venture after quitting as the managing partner at Tata Opportunities Fund. He quit following the Tata group’s decision to not sponsor a follow-on private equity fund.
Sinha has more than two decades of experience in the private equity space. Prior to Tata Opportunities Fund, he was the managing partner - India with Temasek Holdings and also served in the role of vice-president at ICICI Venture. He has also served as a chairman of IVCA.
The development marks a second high-level appointment for NIIF in recent times. Earlier this year, it had hired Morgan Stanley’s executive director and infrastructure deal maker Ami Momaya as partner.
SOF makes direct growth stage investments across sectors such as financial services, food and agriculture, healthcare and education.
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