The noise and activity around what are called "evergreen" structures for private market assets appears to be growing, addressing a need for regular liquidity with fewer complexities than involved with more traditional funds.

StepStone Private Wealth, part of Nasdaq-listed StepStone, the global private markets firm, has launched the Luxembourg version of its recently unveiled private infrastructure fund, “STRUCTURE.”

The StepStone Private Infrastructure (Lux) Fund, known as "STRUCTURE Lux," aims to provide both current income and long-term capital appreciation by primarily investing in secondaries and co-investments, it said in a statement today. 

The offering is managed by StepStone Private Wealth along with StepStone Group Real Assets.

In August, StepStone announced the launch of the STRUCTURE, describing it as an “evergreen interval fund that can be purchased on a daily basis.” (Evergreen funds, aka perpetual funds, are open-ended structures offering a set amount of liquidity, without the end points, drawdowns and capital calls of conventional venture capital, private equity and private credit funds, etc.) 

In its August release, StepStone said: “STRUCTURE seeks to make investments in assets that provide essential services to society such as transportation assets (toll roads, airports and mass transit), power (energy storage, transmission and distribution, and renewables) and data (data centres, cell towers, and fibre optics).”

STRUCTURE raises capital daily while providing liquidity through quarterly redemptions of 5 per cent of the fund’s net asset value. As open-ended fund structures with no termination date, evergreen portfolios are permitted to recycle capital from realised returns and are not bound by the same time constraints as other private market investment vehicles. The evergreen model may help square the circle for regulators seeking ways to widen access to these asset classes without the worry that people will be caught in illiquid assets which they don’t understand, and where demands for cash can suddenly spike. 

A variety of firms operate in this space, such as HarbourVest. Another is Blackstone, the US-listed group, which outlined its approach here. Another example is Hamilton Lane, while others come from firms such as Partners Group, which operates in a number of regions around the world, and US-based Andreessen Horowitz.