BayPine, co-led by Silver Lake founder, assembles powerhouse team for Fund I

BayPine kicked off marketing of its debut offering with a team of high-flyers from some of private equity’s best-known investors, including Silver Lake and Blackstone.

The Boston emerging manager this month filed Form D fundraising documents for BayPine Capital Partners Fund I and a parallel vehicle. The target was not disclosed. Brooklands Capital Strategies is the placement agent.

BayPine was launched in the fall, according to the firm’s ADV filings. Its top leadership includes managing partner David Roux, a founder and ex-co-CEO and chairman of Silver Lake. Roux, together with Jim Davidson, Glenn Hutchins and Roger McNamee – the so-called four amigos – established Silver Lake in 1999 and built its legacy of tech and tech-enabled investing.

Roux is paired at BayPine with managing partner Anjan Mukherjee, a former Blackstone senior managing director. Mukherjee worked in Blackstone’s PE group from 2001 to 2015, leading investing in sectors like aerospace and defense, chemicals, healthcare, tech services and transportation and logistics.

Roux and Mukherjee are channeling their long-time PE and sector experience into BayPine’s strategy, which focuses on tech disruption of traditional industries.

BayPine will make control investments in mid-market companies in business services, consumer, healthcare and specialty industrials, its ADV filings show. Using an innovation-enhanced operational playbook, the goal is to help drive comprehensive digital transformation. No other investment criteria were disclosed.

In Roux’s website profile, BayPine amplifies on the strategy, noting his belief in “the massive potential of helping old economy companies take advantage of the best of the new economy.” Via BayPine, Roux is returning to “his entrepreneurial roots,” the profile reads, to build a PE firm “suited to this opportunity set.”

To execute on the strategy, Roux and Mukherjee have put together a high-powered team.

Among them is founding partner Brian Frank, managing partner of Declaration Partners, an investor backed by the family office of Carlyle co-founder David Rubenstein. Prior to Declaration, he was a partner with an offshoot of MSD Capital, the family office of Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell.

Another founding partner is Marius Haas, until this year Dell’s president and CCO, and before then an industry advisor to KKR’s tech team. The Dell connection to BayPine is interesting as the computer maker is a high-profile Silver Lake portfolio company, acquired in 2013 for $24.9 billion.

Stephen Ko, an ex-KKR managing director, is also a founding partner. While at KKR, Ko headed consumer and retail investing in the Asia-Pacific and was a member of the North American PE group. Previously, he held roles at Blackstone, Clayton, Dubilier & Rice and Goldman Sachs.

Rounding out BayPine’s founding partners is Wan Ling Martello, a C-level executive who worked at businesses like Nestlé and Walmart. Other team members include partner Andrew Goldfarb, formerly with Declaration, and managing director Tom O’Rourke, formerly with Bain Capital.

The unveiling of BayPine and its strategy is timely in light of digital acceleration sparked by the covid-19 pandemic.

A recent McKinsey and Company survey attests to the trend. It found 2020’s health crisis to be “a tipping point of historic proportions” in tech adoption, speeding up by several years the digitalization of companies across sectors and regions. It also found a new mindset among business leaders about the strategic value of innovation.

BayPine did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

Action item: Check out BayPine’s ADV filings here.