Young Slovak financier Michael Kollar, who settled in Prague after stints on Wall Street and in London, is reporting the first deals from his new fund, GateVest. The vehicle focuses on investing with established Western private-equity managers. For the project, Kollar has secured a powerful partner in the J&T group. The group controlled by Patrik Tkáč and his associates works with Kollar through its specialist fund J&T World Private Capital, which is currently GateVest’s largest investor.

With that backing, the fund has raised capital firepower of CZK 1.4bn in roughly two months of full-scale operations, most of it in the form of binding commitments. GateVest received its licence only on September 4 in Malta and is also registered with the Czech National Bank as a foreign fund approved for distribution to professional investors in the Czech Republic.

Kollar, who spent most of his career at Australian investment bank Macquarie, one of the world’s largest private-capital managers, has already closed his first sizeable deal through GateVest. He has committed €17m, or roughly CZK 400m, across eight investment funds run by Imperial Capital. The firm is a Canadian private-equity manager based in Toronto and founded in 1989. It manages more than €3bn and focuses primarily on healthcare in the United States and Canada, as well as on consumer services.

“Imperial Capital has delivered attractive performance over many years. The median net return of its funds over the firm’s history is 31% and the average gross multiple of invested capital is 3.6x,” Kollar says, explaining why he chose a virtually unknown Canadian manager for his first larger transaction in the Czech market.

“GateVest focuses on acquiring stakes in mid-market private-equity funds in North America and Europe, with a disciplined allocation to proven managers and diversification across sectors,” Kollar says. Put simply, the fund helps smaller investors from Central and Eastern Europe gain exposure to established Western private-equity funds that have historically generated returns of 15–20% and that are typically difficult for individuals to access.

By year-end, the fund plans to carry out a further two or three acquisitions of a similar type. “You can already get access to US groups such as KKR, Apollo or Blackstone with relatively modest tickets from around $10,000, so I do not see much added value in competing funds that focus on these largest managers. I am targeting smaller, higher-performing funds where that route is not available. They often specialise in a particular area, such as healthcare, education or software,” Kollar said in a recent interview with HN.

As he puts it, he is looking for the equivalent of KKR or Blackstone twenty years ago – funds whose primary goal is to maximise returns and build a reputation, rather than simply amassing assets in order to charge management fees. He is also offering an aggressive fee structure and tight alignment of interest between the fund manager and investors. Kollar has committed €3m of his own capital to GateVest.

“My own capital will sit in a so-called first-loss position, meaning it will absorb any losses before those of other investors. We charge zero management fee and the performance fee only kicks in once we deliver a 10% annual return. If we do not reach that level, I get nothing. It is aggressive, but I believe in this strategy,” Kollar says, adding that he already has a list of attractive funds he intends to monitor.

He spent 17 years at Macquarie. The first five were on Wall Street in New York, followed by postings in London and then Munich. Over that period he worked on transactions with a combined value of about CZK 300bn. Kollar was part of the team that acquired part of the regulated energy infrastructure from Daniel Křetínský’s EPIF group. He was involved in both the acquisition and subsequent sale of České Radiokomunikace and its Slovak counterpart Towercom, and, in real estate, in the sale of Polish logistics facilities used by Amazon.