The M&A module teaches the deal. This page teaches the firm doing it: how two hundred teasers become two deals, what the screen kills and why, what the Investment Committee actually reads, the plan that creates the value during ownership, and the exit that was designed on day one. With a working screen, and an IC paper you can generate for any of the two hundred assets in the library.
An infrastructure fund is a machine for converting judgement into committed capital under time pressure. It sees far more deals than it can do, so nearly everything it does is triage: kill fast, focus hard, and pay full attention, and full price, only where the asset, the plan and the process all line up. Everything on this page is that machine, from the top of the funnel to handing the keys to the next owner.
Sources, screens, models and executes. Lives in processes and data rooms; measured on capital deployed well, not deployed fast. Two people per live deal, a director owning the IC relationship, and a partner whose name goes on the cheque.
Takes the keys after completion and owns the value-creation plan: the 100-day agenda, board seats, management upgrades, refinancings, bolt-ons. In infrastructure this team is the difference between owning an annuity and compounding one.
Raises the next fund while the current one deploys. Every deal is underwritten twice, once for the IC, once for how it reads to LPs: on-strategy, on-return, and defensible in the annual meeting when something goes wrong.
The incentive that binds it together is carried interest, the team's share of profits above the hurdle, earned at the fund level. That is why a good firm will pass on a deal that merely works: a marginal deal consumes the same team and the same fund capacity as a great one, and carry is paid on the portfolio, not on activity. The full mechanics of fees, hurdle and carry are on the fund economics page.
Deals die for four reasons, in roughly this order: price (the auction clears above the return the risk supports), mandate (right asset, wrong fund, too merchant, too small, wrong geography), diligence (the data room contradicts the IM, usually on capex or contract terms), and process (a strategic pre-empts, or the seller's timetable makes real diligence impossible). None of these are failures, the discipline to lose correctly is the strategy. What the funnel optimises is not win rate; it is never winning the deal you should have lost.
Every firm has a version of this scorecard. It is deliberately crude, its job is not precision, it is to force the team to state its judgements before the model makes everything look fine. Score a real or imagined opportunity:
—
This is the artefact the whole process exists to produce: a paper that asks the Investment Committee to commit the fund's capital. Pick any of the 200+ worked assets, set your bid and structure, and read the memo a deal team would table, thesis, structure, base case, risks, sensitivities and exit. Then print it: it formats as a clean IC pack.
Infrastructure entry prices are competitive and transparent, so the return above the market's is earned in ownership. Six levers do nearly all the work; the worked examples link to the deal record.
Replace acquisition debt once construction or transition risk burns off: cheaper margin, longer tenor, released equity years before exit. The quiet engine of most infra IRRs.
See the refi release modelled →Use the platform to acquire what the platform makes more valuable: tuck-in altnets, adjacent terminals, neighbouring networks, bought at smaller-deal multiples, sold at platform multiples.
Worked case: consolidating an altnet →Convert merchant exposure into contracted revenue the next buyer will pay a lower discount rate for: PPAs on the merchant tail, longer tenancy terms, indexed escalators.
Where contracting moves value most →Opex programmes, procurement, energy efficiency, digital monitoring. Unglamorous 3–5% cost takeout that drops straight through a regulated or availability revenue line.
The totex incentive mechanics →The transition build-out means the best deals grow their own asset base: grid connections, capacity expansion, RAB growth. Every funded pound earns the allowed or contracted return for decades.
RAB growth as the whole story →Sell a de-risked annuity, not a project: contracts extended, refi done, capex delivered, ESG documented. The buyer's lower cost of capital is the final value-creation lever, price it in your own underwrite.
What buyers paid at exit →Illustrative throughout. The IC paper's base case is a deliberately compact underwrite, year-one EBITDA from the asset's reference model, growth at its modelled rate, cash conversion set by asset class, a 50% cash-sweep on debt at the modelled cost, exit at the reference terminal multiple, so it reconciles in your head, not just in a spreadsheet. It ignores construction phasing, working capital, tax structuring and FX. For the full acquisition mechanics (DSCR-sized debt, value-creation bridge, index-linked tranches) use the M&A module. Funnel figures are stylised industry shapes, not any single firm's data. Codenames are generated and fictional. Nothing here is investment advice.