KKR

KKR began life in 1976 as a pure-play buy-out shop and has grown into a diversified alternatives powerhouse that now oversees roughly $664 billion of assets across private-equity, infrastructure, real estate, credit and insurance strategies. Its 2024 revenue reached $21.9 billion—more than triple the figure posted just two years earlier—and the firm has secured a place in both the Fortune 500 and the S&P 500 indices.(macrotrends.net, investing.com)

Recent numbers reinforce the trajectory. Fee-related earnings rose twenty-three percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2025, while assets under management have compounded at an eighteen-percent clip since 2019.(investing.com)  North America Fund XIII, a flagship vintage launched in 2017, is showing a net IRR above twenty percent, comfortably in the top quartile of its peer set. Such consistency through multiple market cycles is the bedrock of our return expectations.

Scale alone is not the attraction. KKR’s global footprint of more than twenty offices feeds a proprietary deal pipeline, and its in-house Capstone team—over one hundred seasoned operators—targets post-acquisition EBITDA improvements that routinely outpace public-market benchmarks. The firm’s balance-sheet and insurance platforms supply more than $100 billion of permanent capital, giving it the patience to hold winners through downturns and to recycle into new ideas when valuations compress.(kkr.com)

Innovation threads through the portfolio. Current funds are backing energy-storage networks, hyperscale data-centres, fibre builds in Latin America and AI-enabled healthcare services, each theme chosen for structural tail-winds and measurable impact. The signature employee-ownership programme, championed by co-president Pete Stavros, has already channelled over $1.6 billion of equity gains to 33 000 non-management workers and aims to create $20 billion of shared wealth by 2030.(ft.com, kkr.com)

For CatalyX, a commitment to KKR strengthens three pillars of our own strategy. First, it grants our investors entry to oversubscribed flagship funds that would otherwise remain the preserve of pensions and sovereign wealth pools. Second, it layers true diversification—buy-out, infrastructure, credit and real-estate cash flows—into a single, professionally managed line item. Third, KKR’s audited ESG targets and employee-ownership track record sharpen the alignment between financial returns and social value creation.

In practice that alignment can matter for a personal portfolio. A manager able to hold assets longer thanks to permanent capital can damp the capital-call rhythm and smooth eventual distributions, reducing timing risk for individual investors. Exposure to businesses where frontline staff share in the upside also lessens operational volatility, subtly translating a social principle into sturdier cash flows. Taken together, the combination of top-quartile performance, broad thematic reach and demonstrable impact makes KKR a cornerstone holding for the next CatalyX vintage—and a powerful conduit through which private investors can participate in the kind of value creation once reserved for institutions.