Client story: Greenstone

The context:

Since its inception in 2011, Greenstone has become the largest institutional-grade placement agent in the Middle East. The firm specializes in helping global private market fund managers raise capital from investors in the region – a highly demanding and complex market.

Headquartered at the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, with 90+ professionals across its offices in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Greenstone has successfully connected 220+ fund managers to private market investors from the region. The firm’s deep relationships with 1,700+ GCC-based investors – including sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, insurance companies, financial institutions, and family offices – have helped secure Greenstone as a trusted partner for both its GCC investors and its fund manager partners around the world. Greenstone’s capital placement expertise spans private equity, venture capital, real estate, private credit, and other private market investments – with a focus on delivering alpha-generating opportunities that uniquely fit its investors’ needs.

We spoke to Jeff Evans, Greenstone’s Chief Business Development Officer, who told us, “We’re dedicated to helping GCC investors thrive in global private markets. To accomplish this, we invest considerable resources in identifying and nurturing relationships with private fund managers who possess unique advantages in their strategies, sectors, and geographies. We’re proud to be the only firm of our kind in the GCC that does what we do at the scale at which we do it.”

The challenge:

The challenges are significant for fund managers looking to attract an LP base from the GCC. Those seeking to stand out in this competitive space must be able to provide ongoing transparency and data to build long-term relationships with investors.

When we asked Jeff about the role data plays in overcoming those obstacles, he pointed to the difficulty in obtaining information that’s reliable, timely, and relevant. “The sophistication level of GCC-based private market investors requires comprehensive analyses to stand out with their investment committees,” Jeff said. “Without a data system like Preqin, it would be an impossible task for our teams to identify credible fund manager partners for our investors. The depth and variety of data available in Preqin Pro gives us different ways of looking at a fund, which, when taken together with due diligence materials gathered from the fund manager, creates an insightful story on how each investment opportunity fits into the greater market. This enables us to promote funds with confidence to our private market investors.”

The solution:

The market intelligence from Preqin provides transparency to a global industry where data is typically private and difficult to access. By leveraging Preqin data, Greenstone performs comprehensive product-market fit analyses across dozens of strategies, sectors, and regions, ensuring that the funds it represents are best positioned for the GCC investor market.

“We are incredibly selective about the fund managers we partner with,” Jeff explained. “Preqin data enables us to confidently showcase why the funds we represent are a good fit for GCC investors. We work extensively to find the right partnership in each strategy, sector, and region – ensuring a perfect match between each fund and a strong cohort of GCC investors.”

The result:

By leveraging Preqin data, Greenstone has enhanced its ability to identify fund managers and investment opportunities that best fit its vast communities of GCC investors. Since 2011, Greenstone has helped fund managers secure billions of dollars in capital across the 220+ funds it has represented in the market. Greenstone’s capped, highly selective platform ensures that only the most compelling funds are presented to GCC investors, backed by thorough product-market fit analyses based partially on Preqin data.

“From a metric standpoint, Preqin has been fundamental to our ability to achieve our dual mission of connecting GCC investors and fund managers from around the world,” Jeff said.

In 2024, Greenstone used Preqin Pro’s ‘Fund Manager Snapshot’ and ‘Funds/Performance’ data to analyze 814 fund managers. From these, Greenstone conducted deep-dive analyses of 143 fund managers, leveraging Preqin’s benchmarking tools, quartile analysis, and charts to establish a strong product-market fit. As a result, Greenstone signed 21 capital-raising mandate agreements with the most relevant of these 143 fund managers – strategically positioning its funds with GCC-based investors.

When we asked Jeff which Preqin datasets Greenstone values the most, he answered, “For Greenstone, we start at the fund manager level and then dive deep into the prior fund vintages. The more data we can access within Preqin Pro, the better – because Preqin has a unique set of tools that enable us to carry out a thorough analysis of this data.”

Why Greenstone chose Preqin

• Greenstone leverages Preqin data to navigate the complexity of private markets and conduct product-market fit analyses across dozens of strategy, sector, and region combinations.

• Greenstone has been using Preqin data and analytics for over 10 years. During this period, it has built a workflow around Preqin products as part of its continued efforts to optimize its services.

• Greenstone also rates Preqin products highly for their user experience, with Vaishvi Seth, a Partner Development Representative at the firm, describing Preqin Pro as “one of the most user-friendly interfaces that I have ever used.”

About Greenstone

Greenstone is an established institutional-grade capital raising firm in the Middle East and a leading provider of regulatory-compliant fund marketing and registration services in the GCC. Founded in 2011 and headquartered in the iconic Burj Khalifa in Dubai, Greenstone has deeply rooted local relationships with 200+ GCC-based institutional investors and 1,500+ GCC-based family office/UHNWI investors. Greenstone’s 90 professionals work with Greenstone’s global fund manager partners with aggregate AUMs of $700 billion. To find out more, visit www.gsequity.com.