TPG has recruited Goldman Sachs’ co-head of infrastructure as it prepares to bring a Rise Climate Transition Infrastructure fund to market. Scott Lebovitz has been announced as a partner and head of infrastructure for TPG Rise Climate and will join the firm in the second part of the year.

Lebovitz, a 25-year veteran of Goldman Sachs, was most recently co-head and co-chief investment officer for Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s infrastructure business.

Rise Climate Transition Infrastructure “will be a natural evolution of our climate investing platform, offering our clients a risk-return profile positioned between core infrastructure and private equity”, TPG founder and Rise Climate managing partner Jim Coulter said in the firm’s announcement. “We see substantial capital deployment opportunities to build real assets in the future, both within our current TPG Rise Climate portfolio and across the broader climate sector.”

Rise Climate Transition Infrastructure had been pencilled in for a launch in H1 2024, chief financial officer Jack Weingart said in November last year, having received “strong interest from anchor LPs”. It follows the final close of Rise Climate I, a private equity fund, in 2022 at $7 billion; that fund was around 65 percent invested as of November 2023, Weingart said. TPG is also planning to launch a second Rise Climate private equity fund.

Chief executive Jon Winkelried last year described the Rise Climate private equity and infrastructure strategies as “joined at the hip”.

“On the infrastructure side, as climate technologies continue to evolve in a fairly rapid way, the cost of capital required to form these buildouts of different parts of the industry are quite large, so we’re seeing infrastructure capital move in a fairly aggressive way. But what we’re finding is that the relationship between the private equity pool of capital and the infrastructure pool of capital provides a flexibility and puts us in a position to create solutions for different companies and different partners.”

Rise III closed in November on $2.7 billion – slightly below its $3 billion target.