Acacia has been active in the Blue Economy / Oceans space since 2017. The work that it has done since then in this space is a good case study of how many of the Acacia competencies can be deployed in a particular sector. The spark was when Acacia was hired to be the private-sector finance expert as part of a consortium that was hired by the European Commission to design what is now known as the Blueinvest Fund.
The first task was to validate the potential demand for additional capital inflows to the Blue Economy sector. Acacia identified a substantial number of eligible SMEs and further built out a database of companies that the Commission had started to compile.
In this assignment, we:
- Carried out a detailed assessment of possible structures and the likely demand for and leverage effect of each candidate structure.
- Designed a financing vehicle that could be used to augment the supply of capital to the European Blue Economy.
- Proposed and adopted a fund-of-funds structure by the European Investment Fund for its InvestEU platform. The capitalization of the fund-of-funds is currently €75m, with a €500m vehicle under the constitution.