Start-ups: Household Names of Tomorrow

Up next is Will Lawson, partner at Seed Space Venture Capital.

With more than 30 years of experience in financial services, Will has an impressive background working with global investment banks and domestic institutions.

His presentation topic today is Startup Household Names of Tomorrow.

Please give a warm welcome to Will.

Thank you very much, Angelina.

Seed Space Venture Capital is an early stage FinTech firm.

We have both a funds management business and an advisory business.

We're talking today about the household names of tomorrow and we've captured five that we'd like to watch.

These are five companies that we've invested in through the journey and that we're following closely or continue to invest in as they continue to grow.

A little bit about us,

Our people, we're largely specialists in both financial services and technology.

We've worked for large international organisations and our people have got between 25 and 35 years of experience.

We've come together because we believe there are fantastic opportunities in this ecosystem and we work as a collaborative, focusing specifically on early-stage fintech.

Our process, well, we look at

a very detailed process of pre-screening to look at opportunities and then we have a dynamic process where we evaluate opportunities through various different stages of screening.

Companies then get the opportunity to pitch to our investment committee and whilst we mark a few hundreds of companies a year, we ultimately invest in

around 2%.

To date, we've made 20 investments across the last five years and we're continuing to invest over the next two and then we'll have a divestment period of five years.

This is our space.

We're in the space specifically around post ideation right through to scale up stage.

Well, what does that mean exactly?

It's where founders come together.

We look to be the first institutional capital into

That means that there might be a capital raising of between $200,000 to $5 million.

Our first cheque, we have the capacity to write a seed stage cheque of up to $500,000 and then up to $3 million of the series A round.

Talking to you specifically about some of the companies that we see as exciting and could be household names of tomorrow, the first that I'd like to speak to is a company called paid.

Paid of creating a solution to deal with some of the really critical problems in the construction industry.

What they've built is a smart contract that enables payments to be regulated in terms of the process of escrowing cash flow.

That enables the subcontractors, the suppliers, to be better protected in the ecosystem.

Smart contracts are designed to reduce the dispute, litigation and bankruptcy risks, and to ensure that buyers get delivered the product that they've bought.

Ativo.

Ativo is an affordable financial advice platform

designed to make sure that all Australians have got access to affordable financial advice.

Surveys suggest that between 85 and 90% of Australians would like financial advice, but are not prepared to pay significant amounts of money for it.

The team at Otigo have developed a platform that enables access for all Australians at a very modest amount of payment.

designed specifically to allow people to navigate their own financial future for less than a price of a cup of coffee a week.

Vailability.

Vailability is a company that we've been close to for nearly three years.

They've developed a platform that allows

brides and couples to plan their dream wedding.

This is an environment where you can experience a wedding story and then build your own journey through an environment that allows you to budget, to chat, to make payments and to manage your invoicing and share those experiences with others through the journey.

Investment markets, well, I'm sure you're all familiar with investment markets because you're on this platform today.

We're excited about investment markets because it's the one marketplace for investors where you can search, review and compare a number of different of investment opportunities with a comprehensive range of asset classes from a very broad range of fund managers.

As REI have done for real estate and as carsales.com.au have done for car sales, investment markets is building for all of investors by self-directed, but also those that operate financial planning businesses or independent financial advisory businesses that they are to search and find the relevant investments for their clients.

Liquidize.

Liquidize is an interesting business.

It deals specifically with the opportunities within private markets.

It's an end-to-end registry that allows businesses to manage their primary capital raisings and also offers a window into secondary liquidity.

Secondary liquidity is fixed price secondaries and ultimately floating price secondaries.

It's regulated by ASIC and APRA and holds its own oversell.

It also has an automated integration with ASIC and it manages the issuance of shares and a payments platform.

Seeds-based venture capital as a fund has been operational now for five years.

We are currently in market looking to raise an additional $30 million.

We launched in May of 2019.

We're currently exceeding our 20% annual return target

and we're open to wholesale and sophisticated investors.

Our structure is a standard venture capital model.

We charge a 2% management fee and a 20% performance fee.

Investors also participate in a 10% tax offset as we're regulated under the Venture Capital Act as an early-stage venture capital limited partnership.

Thank you for your presentation, Will.

Now, which startup segments are attracting most interest from investors outside of AI?

Well, whilst AI is very topical, I think the reality is that AI will present itself in amongst most technologies going forward.

And it's a hot thematic, but really where we're seeing interest in the Australian investment landscape and startups is specifically around PropTech.

Our portfolio comprises nearly 35% PropTech and it sits on the platform that is Australia's focus on property.

whilst fund managers have delivered strong returns in the property space.

There is also enormous opportunities to use technology to create better and more efficient outcomes in the management of property, in the management of lifestyle technology within buildings, in digital applications to make the refinance of property more efficient.

And there are so many other opportunities within smart contracts.

the company paid I referenced earlier is just one example of that.

Will, what is the one piece of advice you would offer to founders raising capital at this moment?

It's been a difficult environment for capital for nearly two years, but private markets are starting to recover and the strategy that we talk about with our founders and the companies we invest into is to really listen to investor feedback

not to be too precious in terms of today's valuation, but really to engage with those investors that really believe in your business and your thesis.

The importance of today's capital is really tomorrow's opportunity.

And so with our advice to the founders is make sure that you're really clear around what you need for your runway, but don't be too precious around valuation.

Thanks, Will.

Absolute pleasure.

Thanks very much, Angelina.