Skills, scale and trend maturity: Ambienta’s Tronchetti on strategy expansion

Ambienta will add a new strategy to its platform in the new year as part of its mission to be institutions' multi-strategy partner of choice. How does it decide what to launch next?

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Nino Tronchetti, Ambienta

In a bid to become a multi-strategy one-stop-shop for institutional investors, Ambienta is planning products in new asset classes. There are 82 possible new products the firm could launch, founder Nino Tronchetti Provera said over coffee at the firm’s London offices last week. The first of these will be launched in early 2023.

Ambienta is one of the few firms out there that can credibly claim to have focused on sustainability trends since before it was trendy; the firm raised €217.5 million for Fund 1 in 2009. It closed Fund IV over the summer on €1.55 billion and now manages more than €3 billion across private equity buyout funds and public equity funds. It recently hired IR and fundraising veteran Laurent de Rosière from BC Partners to help in its bid to cultivate multi-strategy strategic relationships with large institutions.

So how does the firm narrow that funnel of 82 possible launches into one? Three filters, said Provera: “Scale, skills and maturity of environmental trends.”

The first of these refers to the capacity a strategy has to scale quickly without putting “authenticity or performance at risk,” said Provera. Second is whether it uses skills that closely match those already in the building. Real estate, for example, offers a huge opportunity, but the expertise does not exist currently at Ambienta. “We’ll do it later, but it is not next in line,” he said.

Third is whether the the strategy allows Ambienta to back mature businesses that fit within the firm’s environmental thesis. Tronchetti gave the example of the food industry as one in which sustainability has become sufficiently integrated into consumer habits, to the point where a business can take meaningful market share with a resource efficiency or environmental business proposition. The global textile industry, by contrast, is not as environmentally mature, he said.

Provera was not ready to reveal the details of the next product launch. My suggestion of private debt as a strategy that would fit nicely with his three criteria is met with a polite decline to comment. We’ll have to wait and see.

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect the fact that Ambienta’s assets under management are €3 billion, rather than €15. billion.