Pablo Casado, former president of the PP, has launched the Hyperion venture capital fund together with four partners, including Ricardo Gómez-Acebo Botín, nephew of Ana Botín, with the aim of investing up to 150 million euros in areas such as Defense , the aerospace sector or artificial intelligence.
Apart from Casado and Gómez-Acebo Botín, the other three partners of the fund are Joaquín Ortiz Escobar, with experience as an advisor to the Ministry of Defense, and José Antonio Bartrina Giménez, secretary of the Spanish Association of Defense, Aeronautics and Space Technology Companies ( Tedae). Investment banking expert Daniel Lorrain completes the team.
The former president of the PP will contribute to the project his status as an “expert in geostrategy and international relations.” Singular Bank will be in charge of managing the new fund, in which the family office Nortia, created by Manuel Lao, the former owner of Cirsa and now a shareholder in Sacyr, Merlin and Arcano, appears as anchor investors. Other initial investors are the fund managers Q-energy, McWin, Serena and Seaya.
In the information sent to the CNMV, the fund receives a risk rating of six out of the existing seven. Their investments have a term of ten years that can be extended for two and the objective is to take stakes in Spanish and EU companies. 80% will go to medium-sized companies and 20% to SMEs or recently launched companies.
The documentation presented to the market supervisor also specifies that the fund “will not invest, directly or indirectly, in companies whose activity is related to the production and sale of weapons, ammunition and lethal equipment, or with the development or execution of projects whose result limits individual rights or violates human rights.
Clifford Chance lawyers have provided legal services in the creation of the fund, which will have Deloitte as auditor. Contributions from potential investors start at one million euros.
The fund has an international advisory board in which the former Secretary General of NATO and former Prime Minister of Denmark, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and the ambassador and former US Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs, Paula Dobriansky, participate. as well as the former Minister of Defense of France, Michèle Alliot-Marie.
There is also a SAAB executive, Robert Murray, and a Rothschild advisor, Richard Hurowitz, in addition to unicorn investors Martin Varsavsky and Nicole Junkermann.
Hyperion assures that “the current geostrategic scenario reinforces the need to enhance technological sovereignty and security capabilities in Europe, which has boosted investment in the aerospace, cybersecurity and defense sectors by more than 50%, with a growth forecast sustained over the next decade.
He assures that he has already identified projects with high estimated profitability that offer “an opportunity for financial diversification and sector differentiation.” Among the technologies in which it wants to invest is the Future Combat Air System and other dual-use technologies, with subsequent applications in the civil field.
