Tribeca Investment Partners has bought a 7 per cent stake in funds management newcomer Mantis, with Tribeca’s founder David Aylward joining the Mantis board.
Mantis Funds provides support to fund managers starting new investment management firms, for things like distribution, operations and marketing. In return, it takes a share of the managers’ revenues or equity or both.
The year-and-a-half-old business currently has nine boutique partners, including $200 million small cap resources manager Terra Capital and Florida-based US $10 billion global equities manager DSM Capital Partners.
Mantis is led by Tim Cheung, who was a member of Perpetual’s Asian equities team and prior to that, the head of research at Morphic Asset Management.
Tribeca’s 7 per cent stake in Mantis puts Aylward on Mantis’s board as a non-executive director. It plans to increase the stake to 20 percent eventually.
Aylward said the investment’s key attraction was the opportunity to invest in growth of fund managers who Tribeca may not be able to work with directly, owing to its single-brand approach.
“We are sort of the view that with COVID there is going to be a lot of talent out there who will, maybe look to come home. We [at Tribeca]certainly get a lot of people approaching us with new fund ideas,” Aylward said.
“Tribeca has a single-brand model, where we might be running different things but we are all cross-pollinating ideas. That in turn means that we see people who have great performance potential, but they don’t fit into what we are doing or will be competing with what we are doing,” he said.
Tribeca is best known for its Alpha Plus fund led by Jun Bei Liu and its global natural resources strategy led by Ben Cleary.
But it runs seven strategies, including niche ones like a Uranium fund and a recaps fund. Total assets across them all sit at about $3 billion.
Mantis’s board is chaired by former FIIG Securities chief executive Mark Patton. Other board directors include Treasury Group founder Rodney Green, One Investment Group founder Justin Epstein and lastly, Nathan Hedley who worked with Asia-focused manager Astignes Capital as a senior portfolio manager.
Outside of Tribeca’s 7 per cent stake, Mantis’s management and board own 83 per cent of the equity. The remaining 6 per cent is held by a handful of friends and family investors.
