Apostle on a 'mission' for international partnership

Apostle Funds Management is actively pursuing further partnerships in Asia and Europe but finding a suitable manager is a “needle in a haystack”.

It recently partnered with US quant fund manager Qtron in October which followed a partnership with US investment manager CastleKnight in June 2025.  

Speaking to Money Management’s sister brand Investor Daily, managing director Mitchell Gunman said partnerships are the way the firm is seeking to grow. Founded in 2008, it currently has $7 billion in funds under management and Gunman took over the MD role at the start of this year.

“Partnerships are very important to us, it’s how the business has been growing and how we see ourselves: as a partner to offshore managers. What we’re doing is packaging their product in a way that makes it accessible to the broader Australian market whether that’s institutional or wholesale,” he said.

Looking ahead at where future partnerships could come from, he flagged Asia - where some Apostle clients are already investing via unlisted property and Japanese equities - and then in Europe but admitted a three-year European search is yet to find a suitable manager.

“We’re always looking to do more partnerships, we like to try and find different managers and want to build out the stable across different geographies including Asia and also Europe.  

“We are looking at how do we attack Europe, where is the money flowing? There’s different types of products there and different types of styles of managers so that’s a big area of focus for us. We’ve been looking at Europe for about three years but it’s been really, really hard to find a promising manager.

“We’re trying to find a needle in a haystack, that has been our mission.”

From an asset class perspective, Apostle is keen to capitalise on the high demand for private credit recently. Apostle’s current fund range includes a Carbon Credit fund and a Diversified Global Credit fund as well as eight funds from its partners across property equity, credit, equities, venture capital and infrastructure.

The existing credit funds are Apostle Diversified Global Credit, Kayne Anderson Real Estate Debt and Kayne Anderson Private Credit.

But with the desire to have a partner in Europe, Gunman said private credit is dominated by larger players in this region which makes finding a possible partner difficult.

“The difference with the European market is you’ve got so many different jurisdictions and you need a very experienced manager so this is typically being dominated by the bigger bulge bracket managers which are not the type of groups we partner with.”