Meteor5 appoints PE veteran Kevin Albert as senior advisor

Industry veteran Kevin Albert has become a senior advisor at Meteor5 Capital, a firm launched last year to plug the funding gap for new management teams in private equity.

Albert, who has spent more than 30 years in the private equity industry and the bulk of his career as a placement agent, will help the Meteor5 team in making assessments of which new managers to back, according to the firm’s website.

Meteor5 and Albert declined to comment.

Albert is a senior partner at fund of funds manager Pantheon and a member of its six-person partnership board, roles he will retain. He is responsible for Pantheon’s new defined contribution business development initiative. It is understood Albert scaled back his time commitment to Pantheon around a year ago, and is working part time at the firm.

Albert spent 24 years in the investment banking division of Merrill Lynch, and most of that time as global head of the private placement group, where he worked on first-time fundraisings for the likes of TPG, Silver Lake, Cinven and Triton.

“It’s tricky picking a good first-time fund, there’s a little bit of art involved in it, and some science – less science, though, than looking at an established firm – but there’s a place for both,” Albert told Private Equity International in an interview in 2017. “It’s gratifying to see the data about how first- and second-time funds perform very well. But they’re still the hardest to get done!”

Meteor5 was set up by four members of placement agent MVision Private Equity Advisors – Loren Boston, Mounir Guen, Hussein Khalifa and Dennis Kwan – and veteran Spanish private equity professional Javier Loizaga, the former chairman of Spanish private equity firm Mercapital and current chairman of MOIRA Capital Partners. Boston and Loizaga are the firm’s managing partners.

The firm also has a managing director, Sebastián Cerezo, a partner at MOIRA. Both Loizaga and Cerezo are based in Madrid.

Boston and Guen previously worked with Albert at Merrill Lynch.

Meteor5 is seeking $125 million for its first fund, which has a 2 percent management fee and a 20 percent preferred return hurdle. Once the hurdle is met, the returns will be split two-thirds to the investors and one-third to the Meteor5 team, according to a confidential investor document seen by Private Equity International.

The strategy is “equity-like” but is not a traditional private equity fund. The vehicle will provide between $8 million and $12 million to new groups to fund all their financing needs through the closing of their fund, such as start-up costs, rents and employee compensation. In exchange, Meteor5 takes between 10 percent and 20 percent of both the management fee and the carried interest on the firm’s first two or three funds, depending on the agreement.

It’s understood Meteor5 has made one investment commitment and has several in the pipeline.