Chinese investment firm Yingke PE announced on Wednesday that it has raised 1 billion yuan ($155.4 million) for a new RMB-denominated fund, bringing the firm’s total fundraising amount so far this year to over 13 billion yuan ($2 billion).
The fundraising for the new Chinese yuan fund follows the final closing of an earlier RMB fund at 10 billion yuan in May as Yingke PE targeted to raise its stake in the biomedicine and hard technology fields. A few days earlier, Yingke PE had closed its third US dollar fund to back global biomedicine companies. It did not disclose the size of the USD Fund III.
In a WeChat announcement, Shanghai-based Yingke PE said that its total fundraising amount this year is already close to that in the entire 2020 ($2.3 billion).
Founded in 2010, Yingke PE has built a portfolio of more than 200 firms, nearly 60% of which are in the biomedicine field, according to its website.
The firm claims to have booked an internal rate of return (IRR) of over 53.8% through exits from 53 investments as of end-May 2021. After recording 15 initial public offerings (IPOs) in 2020, it expects another 60 portfolio firms to be IPO-ready this year.
Yingke PE had about 50 billion yuan ($7.8 billion) in total assets under management (AUM) by end-2020. It claims to have garnered about 90% of AUM from institutional investors including financial institutions and Chinese state-owned enterprises.
Among some of its most recent investments, Yingke PE participated in a TPG-led, $220-million round in Beijing-based online-to-offline (O2O) pharmaceutical platform Dingdang Health. The firm also invested in a Series B round of nearly 600 million yuan in Simcere Pharmaceutical Group, a provider of pathogenic diagnostic services.
The firm’s founder and CEO Qian Mingfei told DealStreetAsia last November that the firm planned to file for an IPO in Hong Kong by the end of 2021.