October 2, 2019

By Lynda Kiernan

Paine Schwartz Partners announced that it has closed its Paine Schwartz Food Chain Fund V at $1.425 billion. Fund V represents Paine Schwartz’ largest fund to date, having exceeded its original funding target of $1.2 billion due to high demand and strong support from its investors hailing from the U.S., Canada, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. 

“We are excited about the successful closing of Fund V.  This was truly a global capital raising effort, with participation from new and existing limited partners around the world,” said Kevin Schwartz, CEO and founding partner, Paine Schwartz.

With 20 years of experience and having invested more than $2 billion in equity capital, Paine Schwartz has established itself as a leader in the space. Working within a research-intensive investment framework, Paine Schwartz employs a primary research, thesis, and operationally-driven approach that when combined with the firm’s domain expertise and deep well of industry relationships has been able to unlock growth via control positions.

Announced in May, Fund V made its first investment last month in Advanced Agrilytics, an agronomics service business offering cutting-edge precision analytics capabilities.

Founded in 2013 in Huntington, Indiana, the Advanced Agrilytics’ team of agronomists and scientists have multiple decades of experience in soil science, crop physiology, data science, and prescriptive application development. With this well-established expertise, the company  provides row crop farmers with independent precision farming advice, and helps farmers interpret agronomic data and to manage their input and production strategies for dramatically improved yields.

“We are pleased with this investment in Advanced Agrilytics through Fund V,” said Schwartz. “The Company’s differentiated platform and high-touch service offering have it positioned to capture growth opportunities by meeting the increasing demand by farmers to apply precision analytics to increase yields.”

Concurrently, Fund V announced a significant commitment of $50 million from the Rhode Island State Investment Commission, Providence, which manages $8.3 billion in assets with a 6 percent allocation to private equity as of April 30. 

Following the trajectory of its predecessor Fund IV, which closed oversubscribed with $893 million in capital commitments in the final days of 2014, Fund V will exclusively target investment opportunities along the food and agribusiness value chains.

“We have seen an increasing number of institutional investors focused on the food and agribusiness opportunity set, along with the need for sustainability, which is synergistic with driving positive investment outcomes in this sector,” said Schwartz. “We have built a leadership position and successful track record in this area over two decades, and look forward to continuing that execution with Fund V.”