Digital private equity platform Moonfare announced that its assets under management (AUM) grew by 87% year-on-year to €2.18 billion ($2.18 billion) in the year ending September 2022.
In a statement, the Berlin-based firm said the increase in its AUM was driven by the growing number of individual investors, who take refuge in private markets amid turbulent public markets.
Moonfare said the number of its investors grew 63% to 3,272 while its community of registered users more than doubled to over 46,000. In Asia, the firm recently opened an office in Singapore. Going forward, it is also looking at markets such as Japan and Australia.
As of June, about 10% of registered users on Moonfare’s platform were in Asia.
The company, founded in Berlin in 2016, offers investors access to a range of private capital funds, beginning with a buyout strategy from Swedish private equity major EQT in 2018. In November, it secured $125 million in a Series C funding round led by New York-based Insight Partners.
“Private investors are more and more catching up with professional institutional investors and have discovered that private equity can be a safe harbour from inflation and high stock market volatility,” said Moonfare founder and CEO Steffefn Pauls.
Moonfare’s AUM growth comes as global private capital AUM is expected to almost double to $18.3 billion by 2027, according to investment analytics company Prequin. The next wave of growth will be fueled by retail interest in alternatives, Prequin added.
Moonfare is among a number of investment platforms broadening access to private funds. The other platforms available to investors in Southeast Asia include Fundnel, ADDX, and Xen Capital.
In an interview with DealStreetAsia in June, Magnus Grufman, managing director and head of investments at Moonfare, said the current market turmoil is expected to drive supply as well as demand for investments on the private exchange.
“Fund managers, who are already focused on accessing the private market, and high net worth individuals’ capital are seeing an additional need to access this pool of capital because they are seeing a slowdown in the institutional market,” said Grufman.