Member of Nobel family invests in U.S. wealth firm

Alfred Nobel was the inventor of dynamite and founder of the annual prizes.
Bloomberg

A member of the Nobel family is backing a U.S. wealth management firm that's seeking to scale up through acquisitions.

A relative of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and founder of the annual prizes, are among a group of investors partnering with executives at wealth-manager Cardea to create a rebranded firm named Fourcore Capital, the company said Wednesday in a statement.

Peter Nobel, great-grandson of Alfred's brother, Robert, is joining Fourcore's board of directors as chairman and leading the consortium, which is investing as much as $25 million into the new business, Fourcore said in the statement. 

"We look forward to our partnership with Fourcore," Peter Nobel, 71, said in the statement. 

The Swedish dynasty once ranked among the Rockefellers and Rothschilds as one of the world's richest families, but are now most known for the namesake annual awards for those advancing humankind.

Other descendants of the dynasty include former JPMorgan Chase & Co. mergers-and-acquisitions banker Erik Nobel and Johan Nobel, who has worked as a relationship manager at Bank of China (Europe)'s Stockholm branch and is currently at the Swedish Export Credit Corp. Along with Peter they sit on the board of the Nobel Sustainability Trust, a Zurich-based entity that aims to advance renewable technologies.

"Combining these assets under one global organization positions the management team to maximize their value and capitalize on the demand for a broader range of investment offerings," Peter Nobel said in a separate statement.

Fourcore Group Chief Executive Officer Jordan Waring said partnering with the consortium behind the Nobel Sustainability Capital Group will increase assets under management for the Atlanta-based firm as well as allow it scale up its strategy of acquiring rival businesses. Fourcore had $12.7 billion in assets under advisory prior to the deal.

'Turbocharged' Growth

"Members of the Nobel family have really turbocharged the growth effort," Waring, 59, a former fixed-income trader, said in an interview on the firm, which was founded in 2018. That "gives us a much larger scale and, theoretically, the dry powder that we'll have to be able to really accelerate."

Cardea entities have struck deals in recent years for Zurich-based wealth-management firm Trinkler & Partners and London-based Olympia Wealth Management.

Last year it agreed to become a listed business through merging with blank-check firm Global Blockchain Acquisition Corp. in a deal that valued Cardea at almost $200 million. The special purpose acquisition vehicle gained an extension earlier this year to complete the merger by mid-November, while Cardea also raised $15 million in debt financing to support its growth.

Waring, who declined to comment on the SPAC transaction, said the deal with the Nobel family members was the result of meetings earlier this year and led to the company being rebranded based on its four technology-focused priorities, including artificial intelligence-led advisory systems.

"It's been 15 hour days," he said. There's "a tremendous amount of initiatives that we're planning to do together."

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