Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Toronto, disclosed $2.9 billion in commitments it made during the quarter ended June 30, the first quarter of its fiscal year, and after June 30, said a news release Aug. 14.
Within the private equity portfolio, CPPIB committed $600 million to Thoma Bravo Fund XVI, which will target control-oriented software buyouts in the application, infrastructure and cybersecurity subsectors within North America and Europe; $450 million to Ontic, a U.K.-based provider of specialized parts and repair services for established aerospace technologies; and $200 million to Clearlake Capital Partners VIII, a special situations fund managed by Clearlake Capital Group that will deploy capital across private equity, credit and other related strategies primarily in North America.
Also in private equity, the pension fund committed $100 million to Kedaara Capital IV, which will focus on midmarket buyout and minority growth investments in India; $100 million to Brookfield Capital Partners VI, a buyout fund managed by Brookfield Asset Management that will primarily make control investments in industrials, business services and infrastructure services companies globally; about €77 million ($84 million) to Barley (No. 1), a single asset continuation vehicle for a European specialty ingredients distributor managed by Cinven; and $50 million to Scale AI, a U.S.-based platform that combines advanced machine learning algorithms with human intelligence to accelerate the creation of high-quality training data for artificial intelligence models.
Within the real assets portfolio, in the fiscal first quarter, CPP Investments committed €500 million to Blackstone Real Estate Partners Europe VII, which invests in undermanaged, well-located real estate assets across Europe.
CPPIB also disclosed various commitments made after June 30.
Specifically, the pension fund committed about €550 million to acquire a roughly 20% stake in team.blue, a web-hosting services provider and digital enabler for entrepreneurs and small and medium-size businesses across Europe; up to £75 million ($96 million) in a mezzanine loan facility supporting ThinCats, an alternative lender to midsize businesses in the U.K.; and $75 million to Radical Ventures Growth Fund I, managed by Radical Ventures, an AI-focused venture and growth manager with offices in Toronto, San Francisco and London.
CPPIB also said it delivered a net return of 1% for the quarter ended June 30; and a 10-year annualized net return of 9.1% through that date. Benchmark returns were not provided.
The fiscal first-quarter’s results were driven “primarily by investments in public equity and across private asset classes, particularly in credit and U.S.-dollar denominated assets, which benefited from the strengthening U.S. dollar against the Canadian dollar,” CPPIB said in the news release. But these gains were “partially offset by investments in government bonds, which were negatively impacted as markets around the world reduced their expectations of rate cuts by central banks due to persisting inflation.”
As of June 30, net assets totaled C$646.8 billion ($472.8 billion), up from C$632.3 billion as of March 31.
