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Goldman Sachs has agreed to buy venture capital investment firm Industry Ventures for just under $1bn, as the Wall Street bank seeks to broaden its money management platform.
Growing in asset and wealth management has been a strategic priority for Goldman chief executive David Solomon, who believes the steady fee income from managing money can help make the business less reliant on volatile investment banking and trading.
San Francisco-based Industry Ventures manages about $7bn in assets and will sit inside Goldman’s alternatives business which has roughly $540bn in assets. Goldman already held a minority stake in the company, which it acquired in 2019.
“Industry Ventures pioneered venture secondary investing and early-stage hybrid funds, areas that are rapidly expanding as companies stay private longer and investors seek new forms of liquidity,” Solomon said.
Secondary investing, where institutional investors are able to offload stakes in portfolio companies or funds to other investors, has become an increasingly popular type of investment as traditional exit routes such as initial public offerings have become less common.
“It [the Industry Ventures purchase] fits perfectly and extends what we do to the one part where we hadn’t done as much,” Goldman’s head of asset and wealth management Marc Nachmann told the Financial Times.
“We think there’s a lot of interesting things we can do between our banking business and our leading franchise in our tech banking business as well as our wealth business in terms of providing service to tech entrepreneurs.”
Goldman will pay $665mn in cash and equity payable at closing with a further $300mn in cash and stock based on Industry Ventures’ future performance through to the end of 2030. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2026.
“We didn’t run a process to try to sell the business,” Hans Swildens, founder and chief executive of Industry Ventures, told the FT. “This was more of an opportunistic kind of next phase to what we were already doing with Goldman.”
Goldman has been relatively cautious regarding acquisitions, with a mixed recent record. Its asset management arm bought Dutch insurer NN Group’s investment management unit for about €1.6bn in 2022. But it sold speciality lender GreenSky in 2024, two years after it bought the platform.
Asked last month about pursuing acquisitions to grow its business, Solomon said “the bar to do something significant has to be very, very high”.
“The small things that you can incrementally add, sure we’ll think about that stuff,” he said.