Pantheon Infrastructure (PINT ) is closing in on its first US solar power investment as the closed-end fund looks to finish committing the bulk of the £480m it has raised from investors in the past 15 months.

Richard Sem, partner at PINT fund manager Pantheon Ventures, said lawyers were finalising the terms of a £25m investment that stood to benefit from President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. The new act, which was signed into law last year, is set to provide an estimated $369bn (£309bn) for the clean energy revolution. 

If the investment goes ahead successfully, this will be PINT’s twelfth deal since it raised £400m at launch in November 2021 when it became one of the last investment companies to list in London before flotations dried up in the bear market.

It will mean PINT, which raised an extra £80m in subscription shares last July, will have invested or committed £425m in total so far. It has two more assets on which it is in advanced discussions that could mop up most of the rest of the cash.

PINT had to cancel a proposed C-share issue in September when markets roiled at the unfunded tax cuts of then-chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s ‘mini-Budget.

Despite this setback, the company has been busy. In January, it deployed £43m into GD Towers, a network of 40,000 mobile masts in which Deutsche Telekom has sold a 51% stake for more than €10bn to pave the way for much-needed 5G investment. 

PINT is investing alongside DigitalBridge, a Florida-based infrastructure specialist, with whom it already invests in another towers business and a data centre in the US, as well as with Brookfield, a Canadian fund manager.

Also in January, PINT closed a £41m investment alongside Macquarie, the Australian investment bank, in National Gas (the domestic energy supplier to 85% of UK households) as part of its plan to decarbonise its network through the adoption of green hydrogen and biomethane by 2050.

The flurry of deals leaves the OECD-focused portfolio fairly evenly spread geographically with 46% of assets in Europe, 44% in North America and 10% in the UK.

By sector, it is weighted to digital infrastructure with 46% in towers, fibre networks and data centres, followed by 29% in power and utilities, 16% in renewables and 9% in transport and logistics.

In terms of underlying valuation, PINT’s maiden set of annual results for the period from launch to the end of last year belie 2022’s extreme market volatility. Despite the rise and fall of equities and bonds, since listing the company said its net asset value (NAV) had edged 0.9p higher to 98.9p per share. 

It said that a modest level of fair value and foreign exchange gains were partly offset by the costs of hedging currency movements, expenses and the payment of 2p of dividends.

Although government bond yields rose sharply, Sem said there was little evidence from infrastructure deals that PINT’s relatively high 13.7% discount rate should rise by much and put downward pressure on the NAV.

PINT’s share price has been a different story, however. Like most infrastructure funds, despite a recovery in UK gilts, or government bonds, its stock has de-rated to 90.5p. That’s nearly 10p below launch price and 8.5% below the 31 December NAV, a discount that prevents share issuance, although the company has recently arranged a £62.5m overdraft to support its deal-making and to hedge currency movements.

Sem recognised that the low share price rating showed that investors were confused. ‘People don’t know what to think faced with inflation, interest rates and recession,’ he said.

He added, however, that ‘I don’t think it’s justified,’ pointing to the 4.4% yield PINT offered with its dividends targeted to double to 4p per share this year, the inflation-linked earnings on its investments, and its goal of providing a mix of capital growth and income with its annual 8%-10% investment return target. ‘It does look like a good bargain,’ Sem added.

A policy of only co-investing alongside fund managers, rather than through their funds, helps keeps costs down with an annual management charge starting at 1%, in line with rivals Digital 9 (DGI ), Cordiant (CDI ) and 3i Infrastructure (3IN ).

Numis analyst Colette Ord agreed, saying the broker had added PINT to its list of recommendations in January. ‘Management remains confident on the business plans of investments made to date and expects valuations to remain stable driven by strong demand for the asset class in private markets, notably for inflation-linked and energy-transition assets,’ she said.