Paneuropean private equity firm Alpha Private Equity launched fundraising for its seventh fund targeting one billion euros. The sixth fund had raised about 700 million euros in 2010, Â MF Milano Finanza writed today.
Alpha has è strong Italian soul as its is led by the italian managing partner Edoardo Lanzavecchia, who had joined Alpha in 2007. Since then Alpha, which  had been investing with a focus on Germany, France and Swiss, added Italy as one of its priority areas of investment and it counts now 5 Italian companies in its portfolio.
Alpha’s last investment in Italy was last June in Optima Italia (a 20% stake), the company manages energy and tlc supply for businesses and families, offering an all-in-one bill which guarantees the lowest price for each specific profile. Last March instead Alpha had bought Pavan, among the worldwide leaders in the design and engineering of technologies and integrated product lines for cereal based food.
In the previous years Alpha invested in Caffitaly  (leading manufacturer of best-in-class combined coffee systems machines and capsules),Remazel Engineering (designs, engineers and manufactures special equipment for the offshore and onshore oil & gas sector) and  Savio (World leader in the production of winding machines and quality control devices for the textile industry).
Prior Alpha had invested in Rhiag, a leading pan-European business-to-business distributor of aftermarket spare parts for passenger cars and commercial vehicles, which the fund sold to Apax Partners in October 2013 (a few months ago Apax sold Rhiag to LKQ Corporation), in Permasteelisa (which was bought in co-investment with Investindustrial and sold to Japanese JS Group in 2010) and in Cifa, a leading concrete equipment manufacturer (which Alpha sold to  Mandarin Capital and Zoomlion in June 2008).
