Milestone closes Fund IV on $300m

Philadelphia-based Milestone Partners has held a final close for its Fund IV on $300 million.

The lower mid-market firm launched the fundraising process in the summer of 2011 with a $350 million target. Fund IV has invested roughly $71 million of capital to date in four transactions, acquiring manufacturing business Machine Laboratory, content management services provider Image API, recycled textile company Martex Fiber and consumer finance business Southern Management. Milestone’s previous fund collected $240 million in 2009.

“We’ll probably do a few more deals in this fund than we did in the last fund,” partner at Milestone John Nowaczyk told Private Equity International, adding that the firm’s third fund made 11 platform investments. 

Limited partners in Fund IV include US pensions such as the Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System, endowments, family offices, high net-worth individuals and a number of European and Middle Eastern institutions.

“Virtually all of our investors who could re-up did re-up, with only a couple of exceptions,” Nowaczyk said. 

Capstone Partners acted as placement agent for Fund IV.

The closing of Fund IV coincides with Nowaczyk’s promotion to partner and Dan Ryan’s promotion to principal and head of business development. Milestone’s 22-person investment team is comprised of 16 investment professionals and six operations-focused professionals.

Milestone is a generalist investor that targets deals in a wide variety of sectors in North America.

“If you look at our history you’ll see not only the traditional manufacturing, service, distribution type businesses, you’ll also see things that are a little bit more unusual [such as] software, consumer finance, mining, and restaurants,” Nowaczyk said. 

“We’re a little bit more adventurous than some of our generalist peers.”