Summit Closes Two New Funds

Wade Roush4/29/08

Summit Partners, a private equity and venture capital firm with offices in Boston, London, and Palo Alto, said yesterday that it has closed two new investment funds, a €1 billion European private equity fund and an $825 million subordinated debt fund. (We looked it up, and “subordinated debt” is debt that’s paid off after most of a company’s other liabilities in the event of bankruptcy. In other words, it carries greater risk, and can therefore be leveraged for greater amounts of equity in target companies.) Summit, which now has investable assets of nearly $6 billion, says it will use the funds “to acquire minority and majority positions in successful, growing companies across many industries, including technology, business and financial services, consumer and industrial products, energy, healthcare and life sciences, Internet and information services, as well as media and entertainment.”

Wade Roush is Xconomy's chief correspondent and editor of Xconomy San Francisco. You can e-mail him at wroush@xconomy.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/wroush.