Infrastructure investment manager American Triple I more than doubled its capital commitments in 2024 with a commitment from New York City retirement funds to invest in the LaGuardia Airport Terminal B public-private partnership. Executives tell Infralogic’s Liam Ford they are looking for new opportunities to expand the firm’s reach.

Having raised USD 400m in fresh commitments in 2024, New York-based infrastructure investment manager American Triple I (ATI) is preparing for its next stage of growth.

The firm, founded by Henry Cisneros and co-founded by Managing Partner David Cibrian and Bill C. Thompson, began its life in 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the end of last year, New York City pension plans provided the funds ATI used to invest in the city’s La Guardia Airport Terminal B public-private partnership project.

Information on the New York City Retirement System (NYCRS) investment asset hasn’t been made public, but information obtained by Infralogic shows that an ATI-led investment is now part of the private consortium that built and operates Terminal B under a P3. NYCRS and ATI declined to confirm that the investment is in LaGuardia.

ATI started 2024 with around USD 390m in pooled investment vehicles, according to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosures, and is today managing or advising on a total of USD 800m of strategic capital. Since the start of 2024, it’s added the new investment vehicle with the investment from four of New York City’s retirement investment funds, as well as another USD 400m that has not yet been deployed. While it’s had its splashiest success in its investment in the redevelopment of John F. Kennedy Airport’s Terminal 6, ATI was created as a minority-owned firm to fill a gap in the lower middle-market, Cibrian and other executives said in interviews with Infralogic.

“There was then and continues to be, a growing white space in the lower middle market of the asset class,” said Cibrian, who along with Cisneros has a controlling interest in the firm.

Cisneros and Cibrian are majority owners, with other owners including principals in Cisneros’ firm — Siebert Williams Shank, previously Siebert Cisneros Shank & Co. — Thompson, Suzanne Shank and Gary Hall.

The firm invests in three broad categories of infrastructure: Transportation, social or community infrastructure — under which it includes energy and water assets, and digital infrastructure such as fiber or broadband buildouts, according to Cibrian and Sarah Wu, ATI’s managing director, head of asset management.

JFK redevelopment the launchpad

When it was formed in 2019, ATI looked at launching a USD 500m close-ended fund, but later that year turned to fundraising for a minority stake in JFK Millennium Partners, the group leading the John F. Kennedy Airport Terminal 6 redevelopment public-private partnership.

ATI declined to discuss fundraising, but SEC filings for the JFK investment vehicle, ATI Javelin Holdings, show that as of March 2024, the firm’s flagship fund, expected to be a closed-end vehicle, hadn’t yet launched. The USD 400m in strategic capital raised so far is now expected to be invested alongside the eventual USD 500m ATI flagship fund, ATI Infrastructure Fund I, which the March filing says is “a private fund expected to be offered by ATI.”

After its founding in 2019, among the first successes for the firm was an unsolicited proposal ATI put together targeting Port San Antonio’s desire to host a technology innovation center.

“We knew that that campus had a pipeline of needs, and we knew that ATI could bring solutions to that pipeline. And on an unsolicited basis, we approached them, and we helped them craft what is today referred to as the Boeing Innovation Center,” Cibrian said.

The USD 60m project, financed with a commercial loan with Truist, reached financial close in September 2020, during the height of the COVID pandemic.

A few months after signing a memorandum of understanding on the Port San Antonio project, in late 2019, ATI won its bid to act as an MWBE (minority-women-owned business enterprise) equity investor in the JFK Terminal 6 P3, taking a 30% equity stake in the project. ATI helped guide the project to financial close in November 2022.

“Given the background of our founders and now our broader team, we knew that we would be able to access opportunities that even the most established infra fund managers were not going to access in larger-format infrastructure opportunities,” Cibrian said.

The JFK transaction introduced ATI and UK-based asset manager abrdn, which now is a strategic partner with the firm and an investor in JFK Terminal via the ATI-managed vehicle, ATI Javelin.

“To get the reach we need here in the US, partnering with ATI really does give us access to the market in a way that we couldn’t really replicate without recruiting very heavily and trying to build a very detailed and elaborate set of network of relationships,” said Sameer Amin, global head of abrdn’s concession infrastructure platform.

New York firm working with NYC retirement funds

The New York City retirement funds aim to include diverse investment managers in their portfolio, a task that’s handled for the system by BlackRock Infrastructure Solutions, but approval for which comes from the funds’ boards. Taffi Ayodele, director of diverse and emerging manager strategy for the New York City comptroller’s office, said ATI was able to receive a vote of confidence from the funds in because their track record of working with communities in which they have infrastructure investments.

“You do need to take into consideration any risks, and stakeholder risk is a huge one,” Ayodele told Infralogic. “We see hundreds and hundreds of managers in a year. And the timing has to be right, the investment, the sizing, all the stars have to align,” Ayodele said. “Because there’s great managers out there, so you have to stand out in some way.”

Pieces coming into place

With the investment from NYCRS and its latest USD 400m commitment, ATI is now moving forward at a faster pace.

“Our current ATI pipeline is continuing to develop to the point where we’ve got a path to break a billion in assets under management and advisory in the near term,” Cibrian said.

Among its active projects in addition to JFK is the Sepulveda Pass Rail P3 for LA Metro, a commuter rail line in which ATI is part of Sepulveda Transit Corridor Partners (STCP). The consortium is one of two groups under a pre-development agreement with the Los Angeles-area transit agency to put together a transit solution linking the San Fernando Valley and the west side of Los Angeles.

The Sepulveda project is another large one, but ATI’s long-term strategy remains premised on moving more into the lower-middle market. The firm has two overall areas of focus, Cibrian said.

“First, the lower middle market where we tend to adopt more of a ‘buy it’ approach and second, the larger format transactions that we have been able to source and are now actively managing where we tend to have more of a ‘build it’ approach,” he said.

“We always have had a focus in both spaces. We spent time in both markets and in both areas,” Wu said.

“Essentially infrastructure investors’ appetite has evolved in the last 10-15 years – from core, to core double to core plus to value-add,” Wu said. “ATI’s investment strategy mirrors the growth of investor capital demand for core plus and value add assets.”

The firm’s Marie-Liesse Marc, who joined ATI last fall as its chief investment officer after consulting with the company and working on its investment committee for a time, said the firm is actively engaged in finding new investment opportunities.

“With our value-add strategy and relationships, we tend to be able to access large-format investment opportunities. Those take a long, long time. So, in the evolution of ATI, large format projects like LA Metro Sepulveda were an excellent place to start,” Marc said. “However, as now we’ve gone past that inflection point where we have the ability to deploy more capital that is readily available, then we can actively move into the second part of our strategy — operating company opportunities which then allows us to properly balance our portfolio alongside those longer dated, large format projects.”