Osmosis builds team amid €200m fundraise

Osmosis Capital, a nascent fund manager focused on low carbon investments, has bolstered its management team with two appointments.

The firm has appointed Carl-Henrik Bengtsson, a veteran of institutional alternatives marketing from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Lehman Brothers, as partner in charge of investor relations. Bengtsson joined in April and has been tasked with building and managing relationships with limited partners both in Europe and further afield.

Carl-Henrik Bengtsson

This week Osmosis also hired Jim Totty as partner and senior investment manager. Totty has been investing in the low carbon sector for 16 years and joins from Citi Alternative Investments’ Nikko Principal Investments private equity business where he has been since 2001.  

Osmosis is currently in the process of raising its debut fund, with a target size of around €200m, according to market sources. The firm declined to comment.

Osmosis will seek to bridge the gap between institutional investors with an appetite for “green” investments and the wide pool of fund managers operating in this sector, Ian Wilson, chief executive officer of Osmosis, said in an interview.

“This is a unique sector with a unique set of drivers, and there are only a small percentage of managers with track records and only a small percentage who are established private equity GPs,” he said. “Essentially you need people with industry expertise to properly assess the individual fund strategies and target returns.”

London-based Osmosis was established last year by Wilson, formerly of JPMorgan, along with John Bailie, the former chairman of private equity fund of funds Pantheon Ventures, and Sean Gorman, a low carbon sector expert and former business development head at renewables firm Trinergy.