Sun Mountain Capital Services
Direct Investing
Regional Advisory and Direct Investing
At Sun Mountain Capital, we work as partners to program sponsors to develop an investment strategy and a set of services tailored to the investment goals of the program.
Sun Mountain’s experience base ranges from program set-up activities such as establishing the investment and allocation strategy and goals of the program to developing and implementing processes and procedures. In addition, Sun Mountain provides administrative functions such as monitoring and reporting and can design custom reports to ensure that the requisite data is captured for all of the relevant constituencies. Sun Mountain acts in an investment advisory capacity helping, on a discretionary or non-discretionary basis, to identify, access and negotiate with potential fund investment sponsors.
Sun Mountain also represents its clients on limited partnership advisory committees. Members of the Firm currently sit on fifteen advisory committees on behalf of our client base.
Sun Mountain’s direct investment program directly complements the Firm’s advisory activities. We have experience managing direct investments ranging from $300,000 to $10,000,000 and hold board or observer positions on 80% of the companies in which we invest. Because our investments are not made in specific industry sectors, we often utilize and leverage Sun Mountain’s Advisory Committee to help us perform due diligence We have a long history of being value adding investors and our direct investment funds have experienced top quartile returns.
Our direct investment model is unique in that we are “collaborative’ investors and believe that creating strong investor syndicates through multiple rounds of financings build successful companies. Sun Mountain and its principals have co-invested along side top tier private equity firms including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Battery Ventures, Granite Ventures, Globespan, Oak Investment Partners, Aurora Capital and many others.
Sun Mountain’s regional advisory services are geared towards helping programs achieve significant financial returns as well as material economic development progress in the case of state-based programs, thus serving dual constituencies most public programs must satisfy.
Sun Mountain Capital’s principals have established successful regional private equity programs in areas including Utah, Ohio and New Mexico. As Program Advisor to the New Mexico Private Equity Program, Sun Mountain significantly improved the financial performance of the Program taking it from a -14.3% IRR to an 8.8% IRR in two years and helped to secure increased funding allocations to the Program.
In addition, the Program has delivered notable economic development benefits to the State. Forty one companies have been funded by Program funds with over 2, 200 jobs created through portfolio company investments. Furthermore, the Program has been very successful in attracting third party venture capital to the State. For each dollar invested by the Program in New Mexico companies, $6.60 has been invested by third parties resulting in an infusion of approximately $911 million of additional third party capital to the State.
This “dual bottom line” approach is also a focus for our regional direct investment programs. That is, we have achieved top tier venture capital returns for our clients in addition to economic growth through portfolio company investment for the specific geography. Our regional direct investment model provides for Sun Mountain principals to be located in the specific region to ensure the program’s success.