Ridgewood infrastructure fund II exceeds target
The headwinds of a downturn in investment in 2023 didn’t keep Ridgewood Infrastructure’s second water and infrastructure fund from bringing in LP commitments and finding investments.
Ridgewood Water & Strategic Infrastructure Fund II closed fundraising recently at USD 1.2bn, surpassing its initial USD 1bn target, Ridgewood announced yesterday. The fund debuted in early 2022 and by August 2022 already had held a USD 673m first close.
A half-dozen public LPs have announced investments in the fund, including USD 150m from the Connecticut Retirement Plans & Trust Funds (CRPTF), USD 75m from the State of Michigan Retirement System and USD 50m from the Sacramento County Employees’ Retirement System. The Connecticut investment is among the largest in the fund, with several other nine- and eight-figure investments and dozens of smaller investments along the lines of the San Jose city employees retirement investment of USD 5m.
Ridgewood, which specializes in investments in infrastructure in the US lower middle market, said in the release announcing the fund that “Fund II attracted a diverse mix of leading institutional investors, including returning and new public and corporate pensions, insurance companies, endowment funds, and asset managers from North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East”.
“We’ve got all the major food groups represented” among investors, a Ridgewood spokesperson told Infralogic.
The most prominent of Fund II’s investments so far is Fort Lauderdale, Florida’s Prospect Lake water treatment plant, for which a joint venture of Ridgewood and IDE Technologies is providing 25% of the USD 485m capex.
The Prospect Lake project reached financial close in 2023. In 2024, Ridgewood made three additional investments from the fund, which a source with knowledge of the fund said is now about one-third allocated.
The additional investments were in renewable energy developer MN8, liquid and wastewater management firm Waste Resources Management and cold storage and transport company Valley Cold.
“We’ve got a great portfolio and more to come in the pipeline,” a spokesperson for Ridgewood told Infralogic.
Meanwhile, in the last year, Ridgewood has realized the sale of two major investments from its first Ridgewood Water & Strategic Infrastructure Fund, the Vista Ridge water pipeline and natural gas distribution utility SiEnergy Operating. The manager expects to complete further asset sales from Fund I going forward, according to the source.