Camden Partners closes sixth private equity fund with $100M committed

Inner Harbor-based Camden Partners said it closed its sixth private equity fund with $100 million in commitments from investors after concluding fundraising efforts this month.

The latest fund in the 25-year-old firm’s Strategic Partners series includes pension funds, endowments, foundations and family offices. It also includes a fund of funds, which is private equity that invest assets into other private equity funds.

Through this strategy, Camden focuses on growth-stage companies that are often founder led, and works with the companies to expand cashflow by setting strategy and providing expansion capital. It invests in areas such as software, tech-enabled services, business services, and education. This will be the prime focus after the firm’s venture capital division recently spun out to form Catalio Capital Management.

Camden Partners was founded by David Warnock in 1995 after he left T. Rowe Price. Along with Warnock, the investment team includes partners Jason Tagler, Meghan McGee and Todd Sherman, who have worked together for more than a dozen years. Baltimore native Calvin Young joined as a VP on the investment team in 2018 and Sean Long joined in 2019 as head of business development and investor relations.

Camden Partners has raised over $700 million, and made investments in 80 companies across its funds. The firm invests around the U.S., but has also invested in companies in Baltimore. In a recent example of the firm playing a role in a big exit, it was one of the firms that in 2014 backed University of Maryland BioPark-based Paragon Bioservices before its 2019 acquisition by Catalent at $1.2 billion.

More recently, Camden invested in Otterbein-based workforce data science company Catalyte.

Additional investments include digital payments company Ingo Money of Alpharetta, Georgia, marketing analytics company RedPoint Global of Wellesley, Massachusetts, sales automation software developer DialSource of Sacramento, California, and Boulder, Colorado-based workforce development company Techtonic.