NY Shop Interviewing PAs For Fund VI

Harvest Partners LLC is interviewing placement agents to help the New York-based buyout shop raise its sixth fund, Ira Kleinman, a senior managing director at Harvest, told Buyouts.

Credit Suisse has helped Harvest raise its funds in the past and may do so again, Kleinman said. The firm expects to start raising the fund in the first quarter of 2011.

Harvest executives have not decided how much they will try to raise, but Kleinman said the target would likely be more than the $815 million Harvest corralled for its fifth fund, which closed in 2007. “We’ll decide that in the next few weeks,” he said.

Harvest, founded in 1981, makes equity investments of up to $100 million in deals with enterprise values of $100 million to $600 million. The firm targets deals in the general industrial, consumer and retail, and business services sectors.

Kleinman said the firm will also look to divest its remaining investment from Harvest’s third fund, a $362 million pool of capital the firm closed in 1998, Kleinman said. That investment is Global Power Equipment Group Inc., a Tulsa, Okla.-based company that designs, engineers and fabricates equipment for gas turbine power plants. Harvest sponsored a $310 million recapitalization and acquisition of the company in 2000, and took it public on the Nasdaq in 2001. The firm continues to hold a minority stake in the company. “It’s certainly something we need to think about,” Kleinman said.

In early September, Harvest agreed to sell residential building products maker Associated Materials LLC, which was also a Fund III investment, to Hellman & Friedman LLC.

Harvest continues to invest from its fifth fund. Its most recent deal came in July, when it invested an undisclosed amount in Seminole Energy Services LLC, a Tulsa, Okla.-based energy company that gathers, buys and sells natural gas to commercial and industrial customers.