The equity markets have started to look a bit crazy nowadays, going higher even when the immediate future looks uncertain. Trump’s tariff wars with everyone does not help the situation either. A few weeks back, I had decided to trim my equity portfolio and take some money off the table to book some nice profits. I was not convinced that the rally would last much longer as fundamentals deteriorate. Hard Brexit is just 3 months away and the USD yield curve remains inverted.
The next question will be where should I park these extra funds now? Besides opportunistic trades in FX and commodities, most asset classes look a bit frothy now. A month back, I had chanced upon a newspaper article on angel investing and a few Asian companies were highlighted. I started to read more about these professional angel investing firms to see how I can participate in this sector.
“An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an affluent individual who provides capital for a business startup, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity.”
I do not consider myself to be someone who has much knowledge of startups or even how to evaluate one. So how can I get into this asset class in bite sizes which I can stomach but yet be assured that most of the professional screening process is done by experts? Along the process, I would like to pick up new skills as I learn from them.
One such firm caught my attention. AngelCentral https://www.angelcentral.co/ was one of the names mentioned in the article. It was founded by a husband and wife team who had cashed out of their successful startup JobsCentral a few years ago and wanted to start something meaningful and revenue-generating while giving back to society via their past experience.
Given their background, they had started this firm as they see a gap to bridge. Startups need critical coaching and mentoring in their initial years to survive before the first series A funding cycle begins. Small investors like myself may be interested in this space but don’t really know where to start. I always thought that the entry criteria was much higher, having just participated in one similar pitch (vegan burger) that was asking for USD 250,000 per person. Surprisingly, AngelCentral offers investors bite sizes of anywhere between SGD 10 to 25K as a minimum.
A friend and I signed up for the community membership as it was free. It allowed us to participate in regular events and startup pitches. We attended our first pitch event to listen to 2 candidates AnyWhere and Tourego on a Friday afternoon. Their office was at BASH, the incubator startup place at Fusionpolis which was started by the government. We saw a number of like-minded investors like ourselves there, asking the founders various business-minded questions.
My first impression: ANgelCentral looks like a legitimate setup which had put in a lot of thought process into the business venture. They even had regular training sessions for investors, to handhold them as they discover more about this new asset class.
The 2nd pitch from Tourego was something that interested me. They were proposing a seamless process for tourists to claim their VAT/GST refunds upon leaving the country. They were in a niche area that was ripe for technology disruption and the current market size was large with few competitors. While the revenue forecast was a bit overly aggressive, they could become an attractive acquisition for the big boys like Alibaba if they can pull it off. The barriers to entry were also very high as they require licenses from the targeted countries in order to implement their business model.
I Whatsapp the AngelCentral founder who was the lead syndicate coordinator for this name, to gather more details. He has been following Tourego for a few years and for this tranche, he has personally invested SGD 100k. To date, he already has about SGD 1 mio of commitments.
At this point, I decided to get my toes wet and go deeper into this. Via their online website, I committed to investing the minimum sum of SGD 25K. Before that, I had to sign up for the next stage of membership (Angel) which cost SGD 500/year. A few days later, I was given the link to access the Data Room to review more materials about the investment.
The company had spent the past 2 years getting ready to go fully live by the end of this year. They had gotten licenses from the import countries like France, Japan, China and S’pore. These will be the critical countries for the tax refund enterprise. They had also done their audit reports for 2017/18 and verified their IT processes. The data had has given me more comfort that they are a bonafide startup with skin in the game. The master term sheet has just been signed and funding of the investment will happen in a few weeks time.
As an asset class for a portfolio, it has been recommended that we should not place more than 10% into angel investing as this is a very high risk proposition. For every 10 investments, it is highly possible that all may fail. One friend says that this is like paying a premium for an option. You never know what you will get in the end and you may lose all your premium eventually.
I take this as a learning curve for me. Like cryptocurrencies and investments in general, you need to dip your feet in, in order to fully understand the sector. No point studying it for years (I watched Bitcoin for more than 2 years before getting in much later in Sep 2017) and being NATO (No Action, Talk Only). I am prepared to lose the investment, but not before I try my best to prevent that from happening. By having experts to screen the investment and guide virgin investors like me along, I believe the chances of success are much improved.
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