NPS picks Hillhouse Capital for private equity investment in Q3

South Korea’s National Pension Service (NPS) selected private equity giant Hillhouse Capital Group in the third quarter of this year for its overseas private equity and debt investments, the pension fund said.

Founded in 2005, Hillhouse manages $69 billion in assets as of March 2021. The PE firm has backed a number of global unicorns such as China’s laundry detergent producer Blue Moon, accommodation booking app Airbnb and Chinese cosmetics firm Yatsen.

The PE firm has also actively invested in Korean startups.

In July, it joined a global consortium that led a $200 million Series F funding round for Kurly Inc., a Korean grocery delivery app.

The Series F round was Hillhouse Capital’s follow-up investment in Kurly after participating in a $150 million investment with Sequoia Capital and DST Global in April 2020 and the participation in a 135 billion won ($114.9 million) investment in Kurly's Series D funding in 2019.  

In 2018, Hillhouse invested in Woowa Brothers Corp., the operator of Korea's largest food delivery app Baemin. The PE firm formed a consortium with Sequoia Capital and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and invested $320 million the food delivery platform operator at the time.

It was the three investors' follow-up investment of 57 billion won in Woowa Brothers in 2016.  

Write to Chang-Jae Yoo at yoocool@hankyung.com
Jihyun Kim edited this article.