Mill Reef Capital

Mill Reef Capital

Mill Reef Capital was established in Zurich in 2019 by co-founders Gregor Hasler and Nico Taverna, both veterans of European private equity. Hasler previously focused on secondaries at LGT Capital Partners; Taverna had led private equity secondary investments at Schroder Adveq. The firm was purpose-built around two investment capabilities — liquidity solutions and primary fund commitments — with no ambition to manage a generalist multi-asset platform. Its headquarters on Dufourstrasse place it squarely within Switzerland's dense private-markets ecosystem. The firm's liquidity-solutions practice is a structured secondaries operation. It works with fund managers to transfer one or several portfolio companies into a new continuation vehicle, offering existing limited partners an exit while the incumbent manager retains the assets and continues to manage them toward full value. This approach treats GPs as long-term partners rather than deal counterparties. On the primary side, Mill Reef deliberately avoids large, widely accessible funds and instead identifies smaller European managers running differentiated strategies. The firm will underwrite buyout, growth, venture, and distressed-debt strategies, deploying capital across Western and Central Europe. The website cites in-depth market knowledge and analytical rigor as essential to sourcing in this less-crowded segment, but the firm does not publicly disclose specific underlying portfolio companies or fund names. The team page lists 21 professionals including investment, finance, operations, and senior advisory functions. Executive hires include Johannes Heinrich as CFO, formerly a consultant at Boston Consulting Group and group CFO at VIU, and Markus Ruch as CTO, previously senior IT infrastructure manager at Schroder Adveq. Four senior advisors bring additional institutional weight: Marko Wuorinen on legal matters from LGT Capital Partners, Michel Klingler on tax and structuring from Partners Group, Philipp Schnyder on investment management after serving as Co-Head of Private Equity Secondaries at Partners Group, and Philippe Bucher on strategy and governance from Capvis and Schroder Adveq. The firm operates a single office in Zurich with no disclosed satellite locations. Total capital deployed through its liquidity-solutions mandates exceeds €1 billion, though Mill Reef does not publish a firm-wide AUM figure. Mill Reef's architecture is unusual among secondaries specialists. The firm blends a dedicated in-house GP-led solutions team with a primary fund-investment practice that targets sub-scale managers, a combination that places it between a pure secondaries fund and a traditional fund of funds. The governance structure layers a working investment committee — led by the co-founders — with a senior-advisory board whose members were former heads of secondaries, tax, and operations at some of Europe's largest private-markets platforms. This dual structure provides transaction-level execution capability alongside institutional-grade oversight without the bureaucracy of a large multi-strategy manager.