AirTrunk founder Robin Khuda’s hectic week to seal $24bn Blackstone deal

AirTrunk founder Robin Khuda looks pretty good for a man who hasn’t slept much this past week. But it would be hard not to smile after agreeing to the nation’s fifth largest takeover.

AirTrunk founder and CEO Robin Khuda at the company’s headquarters in Sydney. Picture: Britta Campion

Robin Khuda looks pretty good for a man who hasn’t slept much this past week.

But it’d be hard not to smile after agreeing to the nation’s fifth largest takeover, selling the company he founded nine years ago for $24bn.

While he probably would have been forgiven for skipping a dinner with Anthony Albanese on Tuesday to sign the deal, he didn’t. Instead, he chose not to sleep that day, jetting to Perth in the morning, shaking hands with the Prime Minister over a private dinner at the Federal Labor Business Forum that night, and then heading straight for the airport to catch the red-eye flight back to Sydney.

The next morning he went to work and by the afternoon the business he started in 2015 was no longer his, sold for a multi-billion dollar sum to one of the largest asset managers in the world, New York-based Blackstone.

Khuda doesn’t usually sleep much but that’s all he wanted on Wednesday, with plans to get into bed at 9pm. They were of course interrupted as the sun rose in New York and investors began calling. Around 10.30pm he slept for a full eight hours.

“There were quite a few late nights over the last few days. I think we had some people who didn’t sleep for like three or four days,” he tells The Weekend Australian. “This thing was supposed to be signed a couple of days ago … it’s a pretty complex transaction and everyone was working overnight to get it done.”

Thursday was when the real celebration took place, with Khuda and the team whipping out a six-litre bottle of champagne to celebrate the biggest acquisition this year.

“I didn’t have anything on Wednesday but I had a glass of champagne with my colleagues on Thursday,” Khuda says. “It’s really them … they did all the hard work to get us to this point, so I think it was good to share the moment with my colleagues.”

Blackstone’s AirTrunk acquisition has been in the works for several months, and the idea sprang to mind even earlier than that, Khuda says. “I think that was sort of the moment for us about 12 months ago. Look, Macquarie and PSP have been an amazing shareholder to us – they took us from $3bn to now $24bn,” he says. “We did a strategic review and said, ‘look, in order to support our growth we need a capital partner who has very deep pockets’.”

Khuda counts himself as a lucky man because of AirTrunk’s position in the market.

“The great thing was that every one of the biggest investors in the world were knocking at our door,” he says.

“We selected Blackstone because there isn’t any other bigger infrastructure investor in the world. On AI, they’ve fully bought into it.

“They have significant capital and I think that’s going to be one of the key differentiators between us and some of our competitors – we’re going to have a bigger battleship than a lot of our competitors to win this game.”

On Wednesday evening, pumped up on adrenaline, Khuda jumped on LinkedIn and pledged to build a $100bn business.

“Look, I think I got too excited,” he says. But he doesn’t take it back. “It’s not that difficult if you think about it. We’re at $24bn and all we have to do is grow four times to get to that level.”

That project has not yet been named, unlike the sale to Blackstone (Project Amidala), and the sale to Macquarie in 2020 (Project Skywalker) – references to Star Wars.

“(AirTrunk chief financial officer) Prashant Murthy loves Star Wars … I think we’ve probably run out of Star Wars names so we’ll probably have to move on to something else next,” Khuda says.