Invest Europe Leader Interviews: Francisco Velázquez, Axon Partners Group

For the challenges that we are facing as a society. Private equity is the most strategic industry that we have in Europe.

My name is Francisco Velasquez. I am the chairman managing partner of a firm called Axon Partners Group. We are a growth uh technology investment specialist uh operating from Spain but with a globally rich uh footprint in Europe, Latin America, Middle East and Asia.

So I started as an engineer uh in the deep tech uh techn technology space in the aerospace industry back in 1997. But I figured out that I wanted to do something else more related to the investment uh and the technology in the in the sense of the strategic part of it rather than the technical part of it.

And that's the reason why I started Axon in 2006. Private equity has been uh having a hard time in the last three years especially since 2021 but the reality is that the returns that the private equity is bringing compared to any other asset class and it doesn't matter if we are talking about buyouts or venture capital are much higher than any public market or any other asset for the challenges that we are facing as a society private equity is the most strategic industry that we have in Europe being a listed company would enhance our position with a new investor especially institutional investors and at the same time it could bring additional uh instruments like shares to to for the partners to grow within the company being listed has a lot of uh bring a lot of value to GPS and to investors.

Uh unfortunately and this has been well studied in the in the listed private equity round table where I participate with invest Europe and this is not really valued to the from the market. I mean our recent stud studies say that there is a 39 to 45 uplift between the real value of the assets uh listed in private equity and the value that is marked to market in the stock exchange. That means that there is a huge amount of arbitrage to be made today with the valuations.

Um, having more people being listed, bringing the, you know, this standard to the industry is going to bring as well new shareholders to the listed companies and will probably bring the the valuations closer to the reality. And this is something that uh should happen sooner or later.