Cinven is a high-performing firm in a high-performing industry, and the culture that underpins that performance hasn’t happened by chance. Co-managing partner Supraj Rajagopalan discusses how the firm has actively invested in culture and values as a driver of success.

Supraj, you’ve just celebrated your 20th anniversary at Cinven. How has the firm’s culture evolved since you joined?

Twenty years ago, the private equity industry was still in its adolescence. I wasn’t long out of mine! Since then, the industry has matured and become more professional. It has had to. Quite rightly, today the industry receives much more scrutiny from stakeholders across the board – investors, management teams, media, colleagues, who want to understand not just our returns, but also how we operate, what makes us tick, what we’re like to work with. At Cinven, we talk proudly about who we are and the culture that we have fostered over the 50 years that we’ve been in the business of PE because we genuinely think it sets us apart.

When I joined, Cinven’s culture was one of collaboration, hard work, respect – unwritten values that have been pretty constant throughout our fifty-year history. But as Cinven grew and matured, it seemed natural and valuable to codify that culture. Back in 2017, we spent some time thinking about the firm at a team offsite, who we are when we are at our best and the values that would help us always be our best. We came up with five: ambition; commitment to excellence; empowerment; partnership; and respect.

This was a bottom-up process, rather than dictated from the top, so the values that emerged felt very true to our culture and they are not glib phrases – they inform how we approach our work, each and every day. Earlier this year, we revisited them at our annual offsite to see if they were still appropriate to the winning culture we want to cultivate. We believe they are. They remain the foundation for our strategies and their execution.

Can you share an example of your values and culture in action?

One of our values is empowerment. We want to make sure that everyone in the firm feels empowered in their role, whether they’re in the corporate, investment or specialist teams. So, one behaviour we introduced in 2017 was that junior team members would be invited to speak first in meetings to make sure that their voices were heard. Our junior team members also present on behalf of their teams on our weekly pipeline calls.

These behaviours are not a “one and done”. We regularly revisit our processes to ensure they are in line with our values. For example, we recently extended our carry scheme to include our full corporate team. Given our focus on partnership, it felt right to ensure that all our colleagues share in the success of the firm so that we are all aligned and motivated together. 

Those are just a couple of examples. More broadly, we try to make sure that our values are embedded into the fabric of the firm so that they really drive a high-performance culture. We lean on them during recruitment, we build them into our performance, progression and reward processes, and we reflect them in all our interactions, both internally and externally.

And how have your values actually contributed to Cinven’s success?

I think that our culture really differentiates our firm from our competitors – helping us to recruit the best talent, to build long-term partnerships with our investors, and to persuade management teams that we are the right partner in their business, often even when we aren’t the highest bidder.


Recent investments have included majority stakes in classified advertising platform idealista, fund-technology administrator Alter Domus and Vitamin Well, the Swedish maker of protein bars and sports and health drinks. These are founder-led businesses and, in each case, the founders chose to work with us to help nurture their companies to the next stage. They had other offers, but believed their legacies would be best served by working with us, citing our culture as a key factor in their decision-making.


And it’s not just founders who say this. Well-established companies carving out smaller divisions trust us to invest and move their units forward responsibly. In 2022, German conglomerate Bayer chose Cinven to invest in its pest-control business, Environmental Science Professional, now called Envu. And in 2020, when ThyssenKrupp divested its lifts and escalators arm, TK Elevator, it chose us and our investment consortium. It was important for both companies that we had high ambitions for their units, that we respected their achievements to date and that we would collaborate with management, employees and workers councils to help them grow. So, our culture has genuinely helped us to win.

Private equity is not always seen as collaborative, but partnership is one of your values. How does that work in practice?

We are at our best when we work together as partners, a value clearly manifested in our sector-country matrix when our sector and regional teams work together to research potential investments and push deals through.

Our commitment to partnership is also evident in the way we remunerate. We reward collaboration – an approach which helps us to avoid silos and mobilise the whole firm as required. Over 55 people recently worked together on the sale of Arcaplanet, a leading Italian pet care retailer, to Fressnapf Group; followed by a strategic investment in Fressnapf. This was across our investment, specialist and corporate teams, which was critical in getting that deal over the line. 

We take the same approach to supporting management teams of the companies within our portfolio, empowering them to pursue ambitious strategies, and to our co-investors, working together to maximise value creation.

Collaboration means we make better decisions and achieve outcomes that differentiate us from our peers. Our experience shows this approach to be a virtuous circle, breeding further success. It encourages the best people to come to work with us and stay with us. It encourages successful and ambitious founders and management teams to work with us. And it encourages our investors to invest alongside us.

We realise that all those people have other options. They can work for other firms, they can source investment elsewhere, and they can invest with other GPs. But, for those who choose to work with us, we know that our values and our culture really do play a big part in making us their private equity partner of choice.

Supraj Rajagopalan is Cinven’s co-managing partner