Unicorn Capital Partners, a Hong Kong-based venture capital fund-of-funds manager, announced that it has raised $450 million for its latest investment vehicle that will focus on VC fund and direct investment opportunities in technology and healthcare sectors in China.
Unicorn Partners Fund IV, which closed on June 1, 2021, was oversubscribed. Its investor base includes both new and existing investors comprised of endowment and foundations, family offices, pension funds, and asset managers in the US, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
The final close of Fund IV comes less than two years after the firm, which was launched by Emerald Hill Capital Partners alumnus Tommy Yip in 2015, raised $353.5 million for Unicorn Partners Fund III.
Unicorn Capital also raised $250 million for Fund II in 2018 and $210 million for its debut fund in 2016. It raised a small corpus of around $12 million from a handful of LPs in July 2015, enabling capital to be put up to work ahead of a wider fundraise.
The firm’s portfolio includes TikTok owner ByteDance and Chinese on-demand delivery firm Lalamove.
“We are very pleased to announce the final closing of Fund IV and are deeply grateful to the investors, whose support of Unicorn and confidence in our strategy allowed us to raise the fund in less than six months while in the midst of a global pandemic,” Yip said.
Yip left private equity fund-of-funds manager Emerald Hill to start Unicorn Capital, which backs emerging venture capital funds that invest in technology startups with the potential to become unicorns.
The latest fund will join a slew of new funds that are being raised to invest in China. Last week Glory Ventures, a cross-border venture capital (VC) firm that invests in China and Israel, announced the close of its second USD-denominated fund at $120 million to focus firepower on the next-generation IT industry.
In the first half of 2020, 1,069 VC and PE investment funds raised 431.8 billion yuan ($66.7 million) in China, down 29.5%from a year ago and extending a slide since 2017. The number of investment deals totaled 2,865, a drop of 32.8%, according to data from Zero2IPO Research.