Hg

A partnership of roughly a dozen senior partners shares decision-making authority across the three principal fund strategies. Nic Humphries led Hg’s transformation into a software specialist and remained senior partner throughout the firm’s scaling era. Matthew Brockman and Luke Finch serve as managing partner and partner, respectively, with day-to-day leadership of the Genesis and Mercury funds.

Hg deploys a dedicated origination and relationship team, Hg RISE, to build pre-auction familiarity with vertical-software founders across Europe and North America. The firm also converts minority positions into control transactions through its ‘pass the baton’ approach, where an earlier-vintage fund retains residual ownership while a later fund acquires majority control. This layered holding pattern generates visibility into a company’s owner-operators well ahead of a full exit.

Hg invests directly into portfolio companies through its three closed-end fund strategies; it does not operate as a fund-of-funds or allocate to external managers. The Mercury strategy occasionally takes minority growth positions, while Saturn and Genesis pursue majority buyouts. The firm does not publicly raise open-ended permanent-capital vehicles.

Hg covers the growth-to-buyout spectrum within B2B software, with Saturn focused on large buyouts, Genesis on upper mid-market control deals, and Mercury on smaller platform and growth-equity investments. Mercury targets companies typically with enterprise values below £500 million, while Genesis and Saturn move progressively higher up the scale, occasionally handling mid-single-digit-billion transactions.

Hg has historically avoided consumer-facing technology, hardware, and life-sciences investment. The firm concentrates exclusively on B2B subscription-software models in sectors such as accounting, payroll, legal, healthcare SaaS, and insurance technology. It rarely invests in asset-heavy service businesses even when they share a software distribution model.

Hg was originally the European arm of Mercury Private Equity, a UK-based manager. The partnership separated from Mercury early in the 2000s under the leadership of Nic Humphries and subsequently rebranded as Hg, adopting a software-only mandate well before specialist managers became common. The Mercury name survives today only as the label for Hg’s lower-mid-market growth fund.

Hg operates a charitable foundation, the Hg Foundation, funded by partnership contributions and portfolio carry; it focuses on widening access to technology education and employment pathways in the UK. The foundation’s governance is independent of the fund’s investment decisions and is run by a separate executive director, maintaining a structural firewall between charitable capital and limited-partner capital.