Frontier Resource Group

About two years after selling his earlier company, Erik Prince set up Frontier Resource Group early in 2012 and became its managing partner. Headquartered in Abu Dhabi, where he worked and lived, the firm was positioned as an Africa-dedicated investor partnered with major Chinese enterprises, and it courted Asian sovereign wealth funds, wealthy families and banks as investors.⁠[1]

In July 2012 FRG made the first close of its first Africa-dedicated private equity fund, raising $100 million, and aimed to raise a further $400 million by the first quarter of the following year to complete the fund. The firm had made investments in countries including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea and South Sudan. Prince said investing in Africa’s infrastructure, energy facilities and commercial agriculture should matter as much as natural resources: “Our job is to put all these things together and make them good investment opportunities.”⁠[1]

The fund, Frontier Resource Group I, was a 2012-vintage real assets and natural resources fund investing in African agriculture, energy, infrastructure and natural resources; it has since been liquidated.⁠[2]

In November 2012 Prince was leading a group of Chinese investors in search of resource extraction and infrastructure opportunities in sub-Saharan Africa.⁠[3]

In a listed-company director biography published in 2015, Erik Prince described himself as FRG’s founder and chairman and the firm as a private equity company active across Africa in areas such as exploration, mining and energy development.⁠[4]

FRG is an independent private equity firm in the natural-resources private equity category, pursuing natural-resource opportunities in frontier markets across hydrocarbons, mining, transportation and logistics, exploration services and infrastructure. Its strategies cover agriculture and farmland, energy, and metals and mining, and it manages one closed fund with a primary focus on Africa.⁠[5]