Quora Answer: Is It Possible to Get a Private Equity Firm or an Investment Bank in the USA to Invest US$6 Billion in My Company for Growth & Expansion?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Is it possible to get a private equity firm or an investment bank in the USA to invest 6 billion USD in my company for growth and expansion?”

Theoretically, it could be possible to ask for, and even get such an amount.  However, the larger you ask for, the more you have to give back in terms of return.  There has to be some sort of justification for that level of investment.  This is highly unlikely.  Normally, investments of such scale involve strategic infrastructure.  For example, a project I was in involved the building of a smelter.  There was a need to build this because the country was exporting iron ore, but importing stainless steel.  We were looking at output and a market in the hundreds of millions of dollars per annum.  The project cost US$3 billion because it involved the building of two smelters, four power plants for the smelters, and an entire township to support this, in a developing country.

When it comes to projects of this scale, investment banks and private equity firms are not big enough.  They may give you US$100 million at the very most, but it would still take up a significant portion of their outlay, and they cannot afford that level of risk on their books.  Projects like this involve sovereign funds and export credit agencies.  They are broken up into manageable portions of between US$300 million to US$500 million, and given to different parties.  The entire project is then reinsured.  And you need to get governments involved.  The country this project is based in might even issue bonds for this, managed by an investment bank.

As you can see, if you are asking for that sort of money, it has to be a project like this, which may bring in many times the value, because every aspect of it can be monetised.  A company selling a product or service is highly unlikely to bring in that sort of return.  That application will likely fail risk assessment.