High Pitch 2020

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Set up in 2002 by Patrice Hoppenot 15 years after he founded European investment fund BC Partners, Investisseurs & Partenaires (I&P) is an impact investor seeking to help SMEs prosper in Africa and create sustainable jobs and income there. With about €210m raised to date, I&P finances SMEs, startups and regional investment funds in Africa through equity participation and loans, as well as through microfinance institutions. Its I&P Acceleration Technologies focuses on digital startups with €2.5m of funding to be invested in 10–15 startups in 2020–2023. To date, I&P has supported more than 100 capital-funded companies and 20 companies benefiting from subsidized acceleration programs. I&P has about 100 staff based in Paris, Washington D.C. and in seven African offices (Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Madagascar, Niger and Senegal).

P101, which stands for Programma 101, the first PC ever made in history, is an Italian VC focused on early-stage investments founded and headed by Managing Partner Andrea Di Camillo. As of January 2021, the firm has between €70m and €100m available for investments. The fund is backed by The European Investment Fund, the Italian Investment Fund SGR, and Azimut, an Italian asset manager operating since 1989 and parent company of Azimut Holding, listed on the Milan Stock Exchange (AZM.IM).Headquartered in Milan, P101 has invested in international startups through its two funds, P101 and P102. It usually co-invests maintaining a lead investor role. According to Di Camillo, the P102 fund has a higher investment ticket, ranging between €2m–5m, with the possibility of increasing to up to €10m in a single company. The firm also manages Ita500, a €40m fund established in partnership with Azimut in January 2020. With a 10-year term, Ita500 will co-invest with P101’s first and second funds in startups with revenues of up to €5m and SMEs with a turnover range of €5m–50m.

Mayfield Fund is one of Silicon Valley's oldest venture capital firms. Founded by Wally Davis and Thomas J Davis Jr in 1969, the VC is based in Menlo Park, California.Current investments include CRISPR-focused companies like Mammoth Biosciences and biotech startup iLoF,l which is focused on creating a digital library of optical fingerprints for non-invasive patient screening, early diagnostics and personalized medical treatments.. With a total of $2.5bn assets under management, the firm focuses mainly on early-stage to growth-stage investments. The VC has also backed startups like Marketo, Lyft and SolarCity. Most of Mayfield’s exits took place during the 2008 financial crisis and through subsequent funds.In April 2020, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Mayfield announced two new funds which raised $750m in total. Mayfield XVI will invest in early-stage companies, while Mayfield Select II will focus on growth-stage companies outside its portfolio. The company said last year that it has raised a similar size fund every four years and has invested in 30 companies per fund. It primarily leads Series A investments.

Lugard Road Capital is a New York-based hedge fund under the Luxor Capital Group. The fund invests across market segments and geographies, with several late-stage investments included in its current portfolio of 11 startups.In 2021, Lugard and Luxor led the €450m Series F round for Spanish on-demand delivery app Glovo and also joined the $146m Series J round of Indian foodtech Zomato in 2020. Recent investments include participation in the $43m Series B round of food-sharing app OLIO in September 2021 and the June 2021 $28.5m Series C round of Norwegian ocean and air freight benchmarking and market analytics platform Xeneta. 

Investing in hi-tech IT, advanced manufacturing and biotechnology sectors – key pillars of China’s innovation-focused economy since 2017 – the Beijing government-backed Beijing Zhongguancun Longmen Investment manages about RMB 10bn via its first fund of the same name. The firm is founded and led by Xu Jinghong, former Chairman of Tsinghua Holdings, the investment and tech/R&D transfer arm of China’s most prestigious science and research university, whose R&D capacity was ranked in the third place of China’s top 500 enterprises in 2018. The LPs of the fund include social security funds, Beijing’s municipal government and the Haidian District government. Its portfolio enterprises are generally ranked in the top three of their respective industries. Among them, Qi An Xin Technology, which is listed in Shanghai and one of China’s biggest cybersecurity companies; Joy Wing Mao, one of China’s major fruits supply chain companies. In October of 2020, it invested RMB 100m into Beijing Immunochina Pharmaceutical, which develops innovative gene and cell therapies for curing malignant tumors. Longmen also provides mentoring and other expertise and support to its investee startups, especially those that plan to seek public listing.

Based in New York City, Lerer Hippeau mainly invests in seed and early-stage startups based in the US. Founded in 2010 by managing partners Kenneth Lerer, Ben Lerer and Eric Hippeau, the VC operates several funds offering initial investments of $1m per startup. Kenneth Lerer is the co-founder of Huffington Post and longtime chairman of BuzzFeed. Hippeau was the CEO of Huffington Post and ex-managing partner of Softbank Capital that invested in Huffington Post.Its 400+ startups also get support for business growth by tapping into tech ecosystems like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Its 80+ exits include Giphy (GIF) that was acquired by Facebook and home-fitness studio Mirror acquired by Lululemon. However, the IPO by portfolio company Bed-in-a-box online retailer Casper was below market expectations. The loss-making e-commerce unicorn went public at $12 a share in February 2020, closing at $13.50 on its first day out, for a market capitalization of less than half the $1.1 billion Casper was valued at in a private funding round in 2019.

Founded and headed by Susan Choe in 2018, Katalyst Ventures is based in San Francisco with a debut fund of $34m raised in 2018. Choe is also a partner at another Zipline investor Visionnaire Ventures (VV) also based in Silicon Valley. Katalyst invests in seed and early-stage tech startups with human-centric solutions. About 45% of the VC funds are invested in startups with women as CEO or CTO.  By February 2020, the Kalatyst portfolio included 22 enterprises and three exits.The founder of Outspark was removed as CEO by the board of directors due to disagreements over the sale of Outspark. She had used her own money in 2006 to create Outspark, a data-driven publishing platform for game developers. Outspark was eventually sold to Axel Springer and Choe went left the company to join Taizo Son’s venture capital group. In 2013, VV was set up to support tech startups in the US. Choe had worked for Yahoo! and also was the COO of the public-listed holding company of South Korean search and media company NHN.

LeapFrog Investments is an impact-focused investor, managing over $1.6bn in assets mainly investing in Africa and Asia. Its “profit with purpose” has led to investments in startups that provide healthcare, financial services and insurance for low-income consumers. Since it was founded in 2007, LeapFrog has attracted funds from Prudential, AXA, Swiss Re and Omidyar Network, becoming the first impact investor in the world to reach the $1bn milestone. It’s headquartered in South Africa and Singapore.LeapFrog is best known for its investments in the insurance sector. One of the most prominent companies in its portfolio is BIMA, the mobile-based insurance provider that has provided coverage in Ghana, Bangladesh, Cambodia and many other countries. In 2020, LeapFrog invested in Indonesian startup PasarPolis, which is a broker for a wide range of microinsurance products. In the healthcare and biotechnology sectors, LeapFrog has funded Indian genetic diagnostics company MedGenome, as well as Goodlife Pharmacy, a Kenyan company providing access to affordable medicine in the East African country.

Tessa Clarke is the British CEO and co-founder of food-sharing app OLIO that was inspired by her experience of having to throw away perfectly good unused food when she was packing up to move from Switzerland back to the UK in 2014.After graduating with a first-class degree in social and political sciences at the University of Cambridge in UK in 1997, she worked for three years at the Boston Consulting Group as a junior associate. She joined an MBA program at Stanford University Graduate School of Business in 2002 and met Saasha Celestial-One, who was also studying for an MBA at Stanford. In 2015, Clarke and Celestial-One decided to use their savings to create a food-sharing app OLIO after successfully testing the idea as a private WhatsApp group in North London.Before becoming an entrepreneur in 2015, Clarke has held various senior management roles since completing her MBA in 2004. She worked for global business publisher EMAP from 2005 until 2009, when she joined Dyson Inc as e-commerce managing director (MD). In 2013, she left Dyson to become MD of fintech PayLater based in Switzerland run by the Wonga payday loan company. Known then as Tessa Cook, she later became Wonga’s MD for eight months when she was tasked with “cleaning up” the tarnished reputation of the high interest loan company. From 2013 to 2021, she was also chair of the management board of St George’s Palace, a boutique apart-hotel and spa complex in Bansko, Bulgaria.In 2018, she became a fellow at Unreasonable, an organization that supports social and environmental entrepreneurship. For two years until 2021, Clarke was ambassador for the Meaningful Business 100 global event that advocates the achievement of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. She was also a board member for six years at Contentive, a global B2B media and information company. In 2021, her busy schedule now includes becoming a business mentor for not-for-profit Virgin Startup.

Founded in 2013 by Ramanan Raghavendran and John Kim, Amasia is a venture capital investment firm based in San Francisco and Singapore. The VC promotes environmental and sustainable innovations that help to reduce consumption, boost recycling and upcycling. Eco-investments include Finch, Treedots and Joro. Finch provides information about a product’s environmental impact to consumers while TreeDots connects grocery suppliers directly with businesses and households. Joro advises users on actionable steps to reduce their carbon footprints.Amasia primarily invests in startups from seed stage up to Series B, but it has also participated in later-stage investments. The VC also aims to encourage conventional offline businesses to go online and optimize supply chain activities. In October 2020, Amasia participated in a $100m Series E round raised by Dialpad, a remote working communication software firm. In September 2021, the VC took a stake in Indonesian fintech Xendit’s $150m Series C round. Tokopedia also joined the Amasia stable in 2016 when the e-commerce platform became Indonesia’s first tech unicorn after the $147m funding round.Other investments include Super, a social commerce platform that improves FMCG distribution to tier-2 and tier-3 cities in Indonesia, online education firm SkillShare and Rainforest Life that acquires and aggregates direct-to-consumer e-commerce brands.

Goat Capital is a venture capital fund was set up by video livestreamer Justin.tv and Twitch co-founder Justin Kan and Robin Chan, also an angel investor and entrepreneur. Chan met Kan while working at Verizon Wireless when Justin.tv was being launched. Both have since become private investors for over 10 years, with early investments including Twitter, Xiaomi, Bird, Uber and Square. Established in September 2020, the fund’s name was inspired by the goat because good startup founders need to be agile and resilient to survive and be successful, according to Kan.Kan was also an early investor of Indonesian payment gateway Xendit before Goat Capital joined Xendit’s $150m Series C round in September 2021. Goat Capital’s portfolio includes corporate credit card startup Kodo, Indian neobank Bueno Finance, carbon capture developers Holy Grail and web development tool Spore. The hybrid incubator and VC fund has already secured $25m and aims to raise a total of $40m to invest in diverse sectors like digital health, e-commerce, robotics, climate change and gaming entertainment. Funding per startup would range from $500,000 to $3m.

Alison Gelb Pincus is an entrepreneur who co-founded One King’s Lane, a direct-to-consumer home decor company which was sold to Bed, Bath & Beyond, and more recently, sustainable packaging start-up kari.earth. She is also an angel investor and founder of Short List Capital, a San Francisco-based early-stage VC collective run by women.  Short List Capital currently lists 20 companies in its portfolio, which has a focus on investing in e-commerce platforms with healthy, user-friendly or sustainable products. Gelb Pincus’s recent investments included participation in the May 2020 $5.3m seed round of US cookware maker Caraway and a 2015 investment in US-based unicorn Diamond Foundry, the first certified carbon-neutral lab-produced diamond manufacturer.Alison Gelb Pincus was married to Mark Pincus, the co-founder of Zynga and a founding investor in Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and Xiaomi.

Aspex Management was founded in 2018 by Hermes Li Ho Kei who was previously the executive MD and Head of Asia Equities at Och-Ziff Capital Management, aka OZ Management. Prior to joining OZ in 2011 Li worked at Goldman, Sachs & Co in Hong Kong.The London School of Economics graduate is now the chief investment officer at Aspex. The Hong Kong firm focuses on equity investments in Pan-Asia, specializing in sectors with long-term market growth potential and companies undergoing structural changes.Aspex led the $64m funding round for South Korean fintech unicorn Toss in August 2019. The P2P money transfer service platform Toss is created by Viva Republica backed by PayPal. Other participants in the round included existing Toss investors Kleiner Perkins, Altos Ventures, Singapore's GIC, Sequoia Capital China, Goodwater Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners.In May 2020, Aspex also invested in another startup Market Kurly, a grocery-delivery service provider that became South Korea’s latest unicorn via the Series E funding round that secured $328m led by DST Global. In July, Aspex also joined the $900m Series C+ funding round of Xpeng Motors, Tesla’s EV rival in China.

Born in 1968, Jerry Yang is a Taiwanese-American billionaire computer programmer. After co-creating the Yahoo internet navigational guide in 1994, he co-founded the company Yahoo! Inc in 1995 with David Filo while both were studying at Stanford University. Yang did not complete his PhD in electrical engineering to become an entrepreneur “selling internet advertising”.Yang was Yahoo! CEO for almost two years until 2009, rejecting Microsoft’s takeover offer of $47.5bn in 2008. He eventually left the board in 2012 when he resigned due to strategic disagreements such as whether to sell all or part of the company. In 2016, Yahoo! completed the sale of its core operating business to Verizon for $5bn. Yang was also a board member of the Alibaba Group from 2006 to 2012. Yang met Jack Ma in 1997 when Ma was working as a government-employed tour guide. The former English teacher gave him a tour of the Great Wall of China. Ma went on to found Alibaba a few months after meeting Yang.After leaving Yahoo!, Yang founded AME Cloud Ventures to invest in multiple tech startups. As of November 2020, Yang’s net worth was valued at $2.3bn. In 2017, he and his wife pledged $25m to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the largest gift in the museum's history.

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