Ex-Coller Pros Make Headway

London-based Headway Capital Partners announced that it raised $62 million for its inaugural Headway Investment Partners fund, which will focus on transactions too small for the larger secondary players.

The founding partners – Sebastian Junoy, Christiaan de Lint and Laura Shen – spun out of Coller Capital early last year. “We wanted to go after neglected parts of the secondary market,” says de Lint, who worked with Citibank’s alternative investment division before he served as a principal at Coller. “We are acting on the smaller end.” Lint also calls attention to the market’s fragmentation, with large players standing on one end of the market spectrum and firms like Headway on the other.

Headway began raising the fund in the second quarter of this year, according to de Lint. It had a first close on the fund in April and a final close June 20.

The firm’s LPs consist only of family offices and individual investors, a strategy that Junoy, a veteran of J.P. Morgan and the International Finance Corp., says is deliberate.

The firm has done several deals already from its fund. It is interested in buying both buyout and venture LP interests as well as interests in direct portfolios and shares of individual portfolio companies. Headway expects the new fund to have an investment period of two or three years. The three partners have one assistant and plan to hire a CFO.

Headway is the second such firm to be founded by former Coller Capital professionals. Greenpark Capital, founded in 2000 by former Coller executive Marleen Groen, closed its second fund last year with $444 million.