Tanna (40) will be handling the entire spectrum of buyouts, control transactions, growth equity and even impact investments across sectors at the American private equity major. He will be reporting to Gaurav Trehan, KKR’s India country head.
The two firms were informed of the development on Monday. An official announcement is expected shortly.
Tanna, a Wharton School alumnus, was a former investment banker with Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank in New York and London before joining TPG in 2010 where he invested from the firm’s growth ($14.5 billion assets under management), technology ($5.1 billion AUM) and impact funds ($5 billion AUM).
Having been involved in over a dozen transactions, Tanna’s early deals for TPG included Sutures, Dodla Dairy and Landmark Auto, but he became known for consumer tech winners like Lenskart which resulted in a fourfold dollar return in as many years. Nykaa also gave the firm an 8x return in four years. Some of his other investments included BookMyShow, Dream11, FirstCry, Livspace and ExpressBees.
KKR is bullish on the investment prospects in India amid a volatile global macroeconomic environment and is looking to make large bets on businesses in sectors such as healthcare, consumer and technology, co-CEO Joseph Y Bae said in a recent interaction.
KKR, which began investing in the country in 2006, has so far pumped in more than $10 billion into India. Some of its biggest bets include Reliance Jio Infocomm, Reliance Retail, Vini Cosmetics, Avendus, JB Chemicals, Lenskart and 5 Star Finance.”India is a very, very important part, not just of our Asia strategy, but also our global strategy. It has incredible fundamental growth,” said Bae. It has also invested a little over $2 billion in Indian infrastructure. That vertical will continue to be led by Hardik Shah, who joined the firm from Brookfield.
Bae had highlighted that KKR’s future investments in India would focus on sectors such as healthcare – services and pharma – consumer sector businesses and technology adoption.
While the PE firm is bullish on various parts of its business, it is also rethinking some of them such as credit and real estate, which the investor was doing through its own balance sheet previously.
KKR merged its corporate lending book with Incred Financial Services last year and is now evaluating options for its real estate lending platform.
On returns from India, Trehan commented that KKR had delivered returns to its investors in the high teens, consistently. Its recent exits included a $2 billion position in Max Healthcare through the public markets in 10 months.
Other major exits recorded by KKR in India included a $1.3 billion sale of Gland Pharma to Fosun and a $1.2 billion sale of Alliance Tire to Yokohama Rubber.
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