Exclusive: Brown quits Advent for Riverstone

Advent International has lost three members of its investor relations team, including its global fundraising head, Bob Brown, PEI has learnt.

Bob Brown, Advent’s global head of limited partner services, left at the end of February to join Riverstone, a US-headquartered private equity group that specialises in the energy sector, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Jim McGee and Andy Lund have also left Advent’s IR team at the same time to join Riverstone. McGee, who had worked at Advent since 2011, focused on investor relations in the Americas. Lund focused on research and analysis initiatives to support Advent’s fundraising and investor relations activities.

A Riverstone spokesperson confirmed the appointments. Brown and Lund are based in London, while McGee is based in New York.

In an email to PEI, Advent confirmed the trio had left “to pursue a new fundraising endeavor that is outside the scope of Advent’s focus on private equity investing”.

“We appreciate the contributions they have made since joining the firm within the past four years and wish them well,” the spokesperson said.

Bob Brown, who joined Advent in February 2010, led fundraising for the firm’s latest buyout fund, Advent International GPE VII, which closed on its increased €8.5 billion hard-cap in November 2012. At the time, it was the biggest buyout fund raised since September 2008, according to Advent.

Prior to Advent, Brown was a managing director at The Carlyle Group focusing on North American fundraising and investor relations. During his 11-year tenure at Carlyle, he raised capital for the firm's investment partnerships, including funds and co-investments, and was involved in product development, fund formation and marketing strategy, according to an Advent statement in 2010.

Prior to Carlyle, Brown was a vice president in the Private Equity Group at Merrill Lynch, where he was responsible for raising private equity, real estate, hedge funds, co-investment capital and direct private placements for approximately 100 transactions.

Advent’s Limited Partner Services team now has eight remaining members, the firm confirmed, including relationship managers Johanna Barr and Vasiliki Kardana who are based in London, Maggie Sahlman, who’s based in Boston and Sarah Smith, who’s based in New York. The team will continue to be advised by Will Schmidt, a special partner at Advent, who has been with the firm since 1988.

“Many of these professionals have been with Advent for seven or more years and have played an integral role in raising its last five funds totaling $25 billion in committed capital,” the spokesperson said. “We are confident that Advent’s long history of strong investment performance and alignment of interest with investors will position the firm for continued success in the future.”

The appointments at Riverstone come a few months after the group launched a new permanent capital vehicle on the London Stock Exchange. Riverstone Energy, which raised £760 million (€919 million, $1.3 billion), is co-invests alongside Riverstone's recently closed Fund V on certain deals.

Riverstone closed its fifth global fund – its first since concluding its tie-up with The Carlyle Group – in June on $7.7 billion, well ahead of its original $6 billion target. Its remit spans the whole energy and power sector globally, and Riverstone had already put $2.3 billion of this total to work by the time the fund closed.