Livonia Partners

The investment committee is led by partners Kaido Veske, Mindaugas Utkevičius, and Kristīne Bērziņa, who collectively have decades of operational and transactional experience in the Baltic market. The founding investor, Rain Lõhmus, co-founder of Estonia's LHV Bank, provides strategic oversight but does not manage day-to-day investment operations. The partnership structure ensures that no single individual has unilateral decision-making authority on capital deployment.

Livonia's three-country, three-office structure means the firm has full-time senior partners embedded in Riga, Vilnius, and Tallinn, speaking the local languages and maintaining relationships with business owners, banks, and corporate parents. Many mid-market Baltic companies — particularly founder-owned industrial and service businesses — are too small for pan-European or Nordic funds to diligence from Stockholm or Warsaw. Livonia often structures bilateral, proprietary transactions with founders who have never run an auction process.

Livonia is structured as a traditional, institutional private equity manager raising blind-pool, closed-end funds from external limited partners. It is not a family office, though the early anchor commitment from founder Rain Lõhmus provided a significant capital base that helped attract development finance institutions like the European Investment Fund and EBRD as initial LPs. The firm now raises capital from a mix of DFIs, pension funds, and other institutional investors.

The three Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — have a combined GDP of roughly $120 billion, small enough that most generalist European funds ignore them, but large enough to sustain a dedicated mid-market buyout vehicle. Baltic mid-market companies often trade at lower entry multiples than comparable assets in Western Europe, and the region has a high density of founder-led businesses approaching succession events. The exit path typically involves selling to Nordic or pan-European strategic buyers seeking Baltic market entry.

The firm's mandate is focused exclusively on Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — a rare example of a pan-Baltic buyout strategy rather than a single-country fund or a satellite of a larger regional manager. Livonia has not made investments outside the Baltic states, though its portfolio companies may expand into neighboring Nordic or Central European markets as part of their organic growth strategies.

Most private equity capital deployed in the Baltics originates from Nordic or pan-European funds that cover the region from offices in Stockholm, Helsinki, or Warsaw. Livonia is the only dedicated buyout manager incorporated and headquartered in the Baltics with investment professionals residing full-time in Riga, Vilnius, and Tallinn. This local-embedded architecture gives the firm an edge in sourcing proprietary, off-auction transactions in a market where personal relationships with founders and bank advisors remain the primary deal origination channel.

Livonia typically structures deals so that portfolio companies have access to local and regional debt financing through Baltic commercial banks, and can co-invest alongside the firm's institutional limited partners on larger transactions. For platform companies requiring growth capital above what the fund reserves can support, the firm has historically brought in co-investors from its LP base rather than syndicating to competing funds.