ICG invests in Infra Group

PAI Partners sold part of its holding in Infra Group in September 2025 to a consortium led by ICG, already a shareholder, at an enterprise value of €1–10bn. PAI kept control, returning capital to the investors in the fund that had bought the business in 2023 without relinquishing the asset. ICG increased its exposure through its Europe IX fund, investing through a combination of junior debt and preferred equity rather than ordinary shares, a structure that raised its commitment while limiting the equity the fund had to put up. Infra Group builds and maintains the networks that run under streets. It lays fibre optic cable, electricity lines, water and gas pipes and district heating systems, digging the trenches, installing what goes in them, connecting it and maintaining it afterwards. Its clients are the telecom operators and utilities that own those networks and the public authorities overseeing them, and it works across several of those disciplines rather than specialising in one, which lets a client award a whole programme to a single contractor. Demand comes from two programmes running at once across Europe. Fibre is being laid to replace copper, street by street, on timetables set by governments and regulators. And electricity networks are being reinforced to carry the load that electrified heating, transport and industry impose on cables sized for an earlier era. Both are works of attrition rather than single projects, measured in kilometres over years. The constraint is labour. Crews able to work safely around live cables and pressurised mains are certified, scarce and slow to train, which is what limits how fast a contractor can grow and why acquiring established operators has been the route to scale in this market. The partial sale is a structure PAI has used to hold assets longer than a fund’s normal life allows: part of the value is realised, the investors are paid, and the asset stays in the portfolio.

In the past, Infra Group was acquired by PAI Partners in 2023 as part of its expansion strategy.