Crestview Partners Closes Continuation Fund for Two Fund III Investments With Nearly $600 Million of Commitments

Apollo S3 Served as Lead Investor; Additional Investments from Hamilton Lane and the Crestview Team

NEW YORK, April 1, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Crestview Partners ("Crestview"), a leading private equity firm founded in 2004, announced the successful close of a continuation fund that includes two Crestview Partners III, L.P. ("Fund III") investments, VA Capital Company LLC ("Venerable") and ATC Drivetrain Investors L.P. / ATC Drivetrain Group LLC (collectively, "ATC"), with nearly $600 million of commitments. Apollo's Sponsor and Secondary Solutions business ("Apollo S3") led the transaction with additional investments from funds managed by Hamilton Lane, the Crestview team and others.

The continuation fund will support strategic investments and acquisition opportunities for Venerable and ATC, while also providing liquidity to Fund III limited partners, solidifying the returns of both investments thus far.

"We are pleased to offer our investors an option for liquidity or to continue to participate in the value creation and acquisition opportunities that we plan to pursue over the next few years," said Barry Volpert, Co-Founder and CEO of Crestview. "This transaction – our first continuation fund – follows several recent exits that generated meaningful distributions to investors across our funds."

Bob Delaney, a Partner at Crestview, added, "While we remain committed to pursuing exits in Fund III, Venerable and ATC are at exciting inflection points, and we believe this transaction provides the advantages of additional time and capital to support further growth opportunities."

The investors have agreed to contribute their pro-rata share of additional capital to support further growth and acquisition opportunities. As part of the transaction, Crestview offered its Fund III limited partners the opportunity to exercise a full liquidity option, a status-quo rollover option or an option to reinvest to participate in the new capital commitments of the continuation fund.

Konnin Tam, Partner & Co-Head of Apollo S3, said, "We are pleased to partner with the Crestview team and support the continued growth of Venerable and ATC, two differentiated businesses with new strategic initiatives underway. We believe this transaction offers strong alignment and demonstrates the types of bespoke capital solutions that S3 can provide to leading GPs."

Lazard served as exclusive financial advisor to Crestview and Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP served as Crestview's counsel. Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP served as legal counsel to Apollo S3.

About Crestview
Founded in 2004, Crestview is a value-oriented private equity firm focused on the middle market. The firm is based in New York and manages funds with approximately $10 billion of aggregate capital commitments. The firm is led by a group of partners who have complementary experience and distinguished backgrounds in private equity, finance, operations and management. Crestview has senior investment professionals focused on sourcing and managing investments in each of the specialty areas of the firm: financial services, industrials and media. For more information, please visit www.crestview.com.

About Apollo S3
S3 is Apollo's Sponsor & Secondary Solutions business. S3 provides flexible capital solutions to asset managers and limited partners across the yield, hybrid and equity spectrum. Since inception, S3 has committed or deployed more than $26 billion across these strategies. S3 is a natural extension of Apollo's global investment platform, offering partner-oriented capital across asset classes including private equity, private credit, infrastructure and real estate. As of December 31, 2024, Apollo had total assets under management of approximately $751 billion. To learn more about S3, please visit http://www.apollos3.com/.

About Venerable
Venerable owns and manages legacy variable annuity business, including variable annuities acquired from other entities. Created by an investor group led by affiliates of Apollo Global Management, Inc., Crestview Partners, Reverence Capital Partners and Athene Holdings, Ltd., Venerable is a business with well-established, strategic investors experienced in successfully building and growing insurance businesses with patient, long-term capital. Venerable's business operations are based in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Des Moines, Iowa and New York, NY. For more information, please visit www.venerable.com.

About ATC
ATC is a Farmington Hills, Michigan-headquartered company, focused on providing environmentally friendly remanufacturing solutions for powertrain and drivetrain products regardless of the propulsion technology powering the vehicle. This includes full electric and hybrid electric battery packs, electric drive units, engines, transmissions and other driveline products. ATC also offers EV battery lifecycle management solutions including battery storage and recycling. The company also provides engineering services including warranty root cause analysis, testing and production rework. ATC serves the global automotive and commercial vehicle industries from its facilities in the USA, Germany, United Kingdom, Brazil and China and supports automotive OEMs for both in-warranty and out of warranty products, IAM distributors and individual consumers. For more information, please visit www.atcreman.com.

Crestview Contacts:
Jeffrey Taufield or Daniel Yunger
Kekst CNC
[email protected] / [email protected] 
(212) 521-4800

SOURCE Crestview Partners