Goldman Sachs Asset Management announced the final close of Union Bridge Partners I (“Union Bridge”), which closed on 31 December 2023 with over $700mm in capital commitments. Union Bridge is an opportunistic co-investment strategy that seeks to deliver compelling risk-adjusted returns by identifying unique investment opportunities in both public and private markets that fall outside the mandate of traditional market participants. Union Bridge sources from leading external private credit and hedge fund managers’ high conviction positions and invests side-by-side, working together with them to help drive positive outcomes.

Union Bridge sits at the nexus of Goldman Sachs’s $340bn External Investing Group (XIG), which helps clients to find, access and assess opportunities from third-party asset managers. XIG has relationships with thousands of leading managers globally.

XIG is a global platform with 400+ employees and houses some of the firm’s flagship direct Alternatives strategies, including the Vintage Strategies (Secondaries) and Petershill (GP Stakes) businesses.

The Union Bridge strategy is differentiated through sourcing drawn from the scale and breadth of the XIG platform, its proprietary infrastructure custom built for co-investments opportunities, and its fully dedicated investment team – which provide critical speed of execution advantages.

The fund is already ~40% deployed and has provided customized  capital solutions to companies across North America and Europe in diverse sectors including hospitality, fitness centers, software and music royalties.

The capital was raised from a global and diverse investor base including sophisticated institutions, family offices, private wealth clients, and significant commitments from Goldman Sachs employees.

Michael Brandmeyer, global head of XIG at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, said: “This fundraise reflects the growing opportunity set in co-investments, including outside of private equity where it originated, and the advantages of the XIG platform to source and execute these investments. We are grateful for the support of our clients in raising this inaugural fund and look forward to continuing to work with our extensive network of third-party managers to deliver attractive returns for clients.”

Philip Pallone, who leads the Union Bridge program, said: “We have seen a significant increase in the opportunity to partner with our external managers to provide flexible capital solutions to companies across public and private markets. The Union Bridge programs allows us to be stronger partners to our external managers by committing value-added capital in their highest-conviction opportunities while at the same time providing our clients access to differentiated, often exclusive, investments that they would not otherwise be able to access.”

Source: Goldman Sachs Asset Management