Foresight’s one in a hundred game

Claire Alvarez on the joy of meeting companies you never know existed, providing services you didn’t know were needed

Hello Rainmakers,

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When I sat down to talk to Claire Alvarez from private equity investor Foresight it was quite a revelation to hear just how many businesses they see, as a proportion of how many they end up investing in.

When Claire Alvarez joined Foresight Group nearly a decade ago, she stepped into a world where the stories of Britain’s most enterprising businesses often go untold.

Today, as a senior figure at one of the UK’s most active regional private equity investors, she says she’s on nothing short of mission to change that narrative—one deal at a time.

A Regional Revolution in Private Equity

Foresight’s regional strategy is ambitious, addressing a gap in the market for £1m-£10m equity investments in small and medium-sized growth companies, through funds often backed by regional pension funds and delivering both attractive economic returns and broader long‐term benefits for regional communities.

Over the past ten years, the firm has rolled out a network of offices across the UK, from Nottingham and Manchester to Edinburgh, Belfast, and soon, Sheffield.

This expansion is more than a real estate play. It’s about deploying capital where it’s needed most. “As we’ve been doing that, we’ve been raising regional funds,” she says.

“We’re on the second iteration of that in the North West… and we’ll be looking to the third iteration of that fund in the near future, hopefully. And then we’ve kind of copied that model across the UK, so we’ve got lots of capital to deploy regionally because there is still that bias of funding going towards London.”

Alvarez is quick to point out the stark statistics: “Something like 80% of funding goes to London and the south east, still. So we see lots and lots of deal flow across the entire UK in places where regions where they might be typically underserved through corporate finance and private equity. And we make sure that we’re going out seeing all those introducers, and as a consequence, we’ve got really, really strong deal flow, and we’ve got lots of capital to deploy.”

The Hidden Gems of British Business

When I spoke to her boss James Livingston last year I got a strategic view of what Foresight is doing, but Claire Alvarez offers a gritty view of the hard yards her and her team put in to meeting businesses and running a regional portfolio.