Alliance Partners

Saturday, January 29, 2022

Square Peg looking fairly and Squarely into disrupting Vocational and Higher Education




Square Peg and Seek  Investments  have led a $40m series B round  in Singapore based Cialfo, supporting founders Rohan Pasari, Stanley Chia and William Hund’s vision in transforming international education for the better - making it more accessible .


They do this by providing access to international higher education options for students worldwide. 


Square Peg, together with Seek,  join existing investors including  Susquehanna Growth Equity (SGE), Vulcan Capital, DLF Venture, January Capital, and Lim Teck Lee investments.


Singapore’s  e-learning market is expected to hit US$2.2 billion in value by 2027.


It’s predicted that the total market value of higher education will grow from $280 billion to $400 billion, serve more than 7 million students by 2030.


https://lnkd.in/gqAHqxGz


Investment notes by Square Peg

https://www.squarepegcap.com/blog/investment-notes-cialfo-usd40m-series-b

Thursday, January 27, 2022

The Logistics of Tech-Enabled Businesses: EVP’s Investment in Explorate

EVP’s file notes on its investment in Explorate

T‍hanks Justin Lipman 

Last week - EVP  lead their $7.5m Series A round in Explorate.

The mission - to modernise the Freight Forwarding industry and streamline the workflow for supply chain professionals. 

The platform includes an Instant Quotes and Bookings service with live pricing. All shipments are tracked in real-time with email notifications flagging issues as they arise. Importantly, the platform becomes the source of truth for logistics information and compliance with documentation storage as a core module. 

Exponential Growth 

The business launched in 2018 and has quickly scaled to over 100 customers, delivering > $75m in gross bookings across 300 port pairings. The business is growing at around 5x YoY, has only ever churned 4 customers and now has 26 employees based in Brisbane.

Our investment in Explorate fits into a trend I’ve been observing lately of compelling tech-enabled, traditional businesses. 

Using tech to disrupt  old inefficient practices in a fragmented industry 

They are an old economy company, reskinned with technology at its core, from the ground up. This gives the enterprise inherent efficiency advantages against competitors. Often this has led to major pricing and customer experience edges. And regularly these companies can scale FAR beyond the potential of a non-tech led business delivering a comparable proposition. These tech-enabled, traditional businesses are effectively a new form of vertical integration. 

Hnry, one of our NZ based portfolio companies, is a fine example.

 Hnry is effectively the world’s most efficient tax agency. By building a slick product experience for their customers, integrating into existing banking payment rails and automating an enormous amount of a regular tax agent’s workflow, they have been able to scale to tens of thousands of customers with a minimal service effort. Rather than selling software to tax agents to help them run their company, they are the tax agent, using the software in their own business and competing directly with incumbents.

Explorate is a business that fits squarely with this pattern. 

Founders Conor Hagan and Alex Ewart have long-standing backgrounds from within the freight forwarding industry. 

Having observed the status quo of their sector, they have set about improving the industry for all participants. They bring deep domain expertise to the table and seem uniquely positioned to solve the industry’s problems. Not necessarily by providing products in the hands of their customers, but by using technology internally to provide a more efficient and higher quality offering. 

Customer Focussed

We see Explorate’s product and technology layer to be similar to that of Hnry and other tech-enabled companies. While product engagement is critical for the end customer, this type of business model requires a dedicated service layer that is hard to absolve. Often R&D efforts are as much internally focused as they are building products for the customer. We believe that this type of innovation is sufficient to drive significant venture style returns and believe that Explorate’s exceptional approach to its customers, driven by internally used software, is a key underpinning to its competitive advantage.

Great team

We are excited to invest in the business for many reasons. But most of these reasons are predicated on the fact that Explorate is being driven by two individuals with a strong affinity to their customer’s pain points, deep networks to leverage within the market and a level of commitment and passion around their mission that is obvious. With that overlay, here is our thesis:


Global Freight is an Offline, Vast Industry


Global freight is one of the truly large industries, accounting for 12% of global GDP. Freight, generally defined as the transportation of anything that is too heavy for a human to lift, is also one of the least efficient industries. It’s chaotic, highly fragmented, regional, and opaque. Shippers rely on expensive brokers and freight forwarders that coordinate shipments over phone calls and email, using spreadsheets and relying on previous relationships. 

The complexity of delivering a parcel from Australia to abroad relies on dozens of parties (factories, warehouses, trucks, planes, banks, insurers and more) and incredibly complicated standards. This makes the challenge of tracking and visibility significant. Often shippers are only made aware that their container will not arrive as intended after the fact. No human with a spreadsheet can manually optimise all of these criteria. As an example outcome of this milieu, almost 35% of all miles driven by trucks in the US aren’t actually transporting any freight. 


Freight is Complex with an Established Workflow


There are over 40,000 freight forwarders worldwide, managing shipments of $600-700B worth of goods, and creating 12B associated documents each year (bills of lading, invoices, customs declarations etc). Each of these documents requires several iterations of low value manual checking and data wrangling. Transactions often involve completely unstructured data in emailed PDFs & Excel, that are then manually input (multiple times by different participants) into disconnected ERPs. A data network effect should emerge for the player who builds the largest repository of truth across the industry.

The market has operated roughly under the same rules and processes for decades, without a real impetus to change. Given the complex web of participants, it is difficult to digitise multiple stakeholders concurrently. On average, 18 participants are required to ship something from China to Aus. Convincing them all to adopt a new platform simultaneously is challenging. The freight industry industry workflow is incredibly complex, involving multiple stakeholders, all with disparate, offline systems and process. Here is an indicative timeline for a straight-forward import/export delivery involving a single manufacturer.


The existing freight workflow

COVID-19 has provided this impetus and accelerated the freight industry’s shift to digital. Managing capacity and the input costs of logistics is now a burning issue for retailers. The delivery experience is fast becoming a core differentiator. Pricing volatility is eroding margins for many. For transport providers, visibility has never been more important.


Network Effects + Logistics = A Journey We’ve Enjoyed Before

We are fortunate to have previous logistics experience via our relationship with Shippit. We first invested in that business when founders Will and Rob were still employed in ordinary day jobs. Some 6 years later Shippit has grown to 100s of staff globally, delivering 10s of millions of parcels in the Australian market each year. We have long held the belief that the logistics space has significant opportunity for software and technology innovation. We were fortunate to invest behind this thesis well in advance of the pandemic that has so obviously accelerated the trend to digital in this particularly category. 

One of the key learnings from the Shippit journey has been watching a flywheel and a range of network effects emerge. We believe Explorate has a similar flywheel starting to turn:

Explorate's Flywheel


Scale Network Effect – The Explorate business benefits from a powerful flywheel that drives scale benefits to all participants (see diagram above/below). As more shippers join the network, the platform is able to better fulfill quotes and drive superior utilisation in its shipping lanes. More volume leads to lower input costs and improved margins. As a result, Explorate can undercut the marketplace, delivering take rates that traditional providers are unable to match. Explorate’s ability to access capital markets also allows it to fund investment into superior technology and customer experience – serving to further accelerate the flywheel by capturing greater share of volume from its customer base.

Data Network Effect – As Explorate becomes the single source of truth, and the central communication hub, dictating its customer’s supply chain, the storage of documentation and data creates material switching costs and long-term reliance on the product offering. Global freight is dictated by a complex regulatory environment that mandates long-term record keeping and consistent submissions and declarations through customs, financiers, insurers and other market participants. As Explorate automates much of this information capture (via API integration) and sharing process, it drives both long term retention but also increases the likelihood its customers pick Explorate to facilitate volume rather than alternative, offline brokers.

The right team - the right product in the right place at the right time 

Explorate has strong evidence to show that it has the right team and product capability to go after what is evidently a large market opportunity. The next 12 months will be all about customer adoption, both new customers and increased share of wallet from existing shippers, revenue growth and further product development. The team has proven an ability to build strong customer advocacy and product usage and we see these factors as underpinning the next rapid phase of growth. We are pleased to be the capital partner of choice to help to fund these efforts.


Saturday, January 22, 2022

Car next Door

Car Next Door - a community car sharing business and app - founded by Will Davies - has been sold to UBER for far North of the last  $50m round .

Having started up 10 years ago - and being showcased on Shark Tank, where Steve Baxter invested $300k , the business has raised circa $35m feom the likes of  @wayne  Baskin, Steve Baxter, Liberman, Nab Ventures and has been chaired by Trevor Folsom.

A great exit for investors - and a great opportunity for Will to scale on steroids! 

Uber will have the opportunity to offer its subscribers an opportunity to catch an UBER or use “the car next door”




Great post by Trevor Folsom

What a ride!

Congratulations Will Davies  David Trumbull  and the Car Next Door team.

It’s been a wonderful journey so far and to have Uber now partner the next phase of growth will be exciting for the founders and the broader team and car owners + customers.

For me, the learning and stories to share have been plentiful. I am so massively impressed by all involved and will over time share these learnings and recognise those involved. We have all experienced so many highs and lows over the past 7yrs.

Pleasure to share the experience with an impressive board in Michael Rosenbaum  Wayne Baskin  Chris Miller  John Kett  John Phillips and incredible investors/advisors like Creel Price  Steve Baxter Berge der Sarkissian and our wider Club Investible   

We always talk about backing good founders that are good humans first. We also compare the journey of a startup much like that of a mountain climber, trying to challenge themselves. We all aspire to get to the top but most times it’s getting off the mountain that is where the danger can lie and many have difficulty in getting off the mountain.

In this case, great leadership of the founders and executive team has allowed the brave and early backers to get off the mountain and now the team and founders will have other mountains to concur (& achieve their ultimate vision). 

Its going to be another great ride as this time they will climb with their own experiences and a great global partner in Uber to help guide and Sherpa the adventure

A great article to read below about the journey ….check it out! Thanks 🌏 Franko Ali 
 #admiration  #founders #startup #leadership #learning #experience

From Michael Rosenbaum

Delighted for the entire Car Next Door  team on the exciting announcement today that they have been acquired by and are joining the Uber family!

Will Davies & David Trumbull are 2 of the most tenacious guys I know, and have built CND with authenticity and environmental sustainability at the core of the company.

It's been a lot of fun to be a small part of the journey, with CND being my 1st NED board role in 2016. Proud to have been an early investor in the business.

Excited to see the next evolution of the business and to see the team carry out their vision in this new turbocharged vehicle! 

Thanks to Trevor Folsom, Wayne Baskin, Will, Dave, Hyundai Motor Company and Ampol Australia who have been a terrific board over the past 6 years. I’ve learnt a lot from you guys.

Friday, January 21, 2022

Explorate raises $7.5m from Leigh Jasper and eVP


Co-founders Conor Hagan and Alex Ewart - freight forwarding experts ,  have  raised $7.5 million from Leigh Jasper  and Justin Lipman and Les Szekely of  @EVP_VC , to digitise an inefficient process in the logistics industry  to provide an exceptional customer experience. 


The pain 

The founders  mentor,  Paul Little AO (for his services to logistics -and former CEO  of Toll ) ,through the Skalata Ventures program,  helped them focus on the pain of the logistics industry


About half of the world’s yearly containers still being booked by phone or fax.


The information flow that is required to ship goods around the world is becoming increasingly complex and the cost of shipping internationally has skyrocketed.


Customer Service is lacking


What Exploratedoes 


Explorate gives importers and exporters an amazing CX by providing digital access to quotes and bookings, real-time tracking and tracing, digital dashboards and workflow management.


“Our platform helps importers and exporters to reduce these supply chain impacts by comparing rates and sailing times, simplifying complicated shipments as well as giving insight into the carbon impact of their logistics operations.”


More than $200 million of goods have now been shipped through the platform.


The money 


It’s like deja vu for Leigh  Jasper who solved a similar pain for the construction industry 


The logistics sector had been slow adopters of technology, and that meant there is plenty of scope for disruption. 

  • Big problem 
  • Big opportunity 


The money will be used to increase the team from  35 people to 70 within the next 12 months.


What the founders have to say


“The vision -  to be one of the world’s leading freight forwarders, even taking the digital component out of it.


“With Japan Post buying Toll and its performance since then, there’s a big gap in the market. 

We have the ingredients - the software, the team,the investors and the money.

That void is now ours to fill.” enthuses Conor Hogan


Richard White from WiseTech here’s a formidable competitor 



Thursday, January 20, 2022

Danny’s Grocery Delivery business, Milkrun, raises $86m 6 months after launch

Danny Milham (co-founder of Koala) started a grocery delivery business - “Milkrun” with a seed round of $11m 7 months ago -  in June 21.


6 months later - he has raised a further  $75 million series A round  led by Tiger Global Management with AirTree Ventures, Skip Capital and Grok Ventures  co-investing . 


“It took us eight months to raise $100,000 at a $1 million valuation at Our last venture, Koala. In June it took us two weeks to raise $11 million to start the business in June - at a crazy valuation.


 Being a second-time founder it’s a different world.” Says Danny 


What Milkrun Does 


Milkrun delivers groceries to you and currently operates in 35 suburbs around Sydney. It has  created a network of warehouses (dark stores) , which stock up to 2000 grocery products and enable delivery riders on e-bikes to get groceries to customers in 10 minutes or less.


Since launching 6 months ago - it has 

a team of 500 employed staff – and  is hiring up to 40 new people every week . Danny tips to hit 1000 employees within a few months.


It’s a logistics business - and the systems needs to be smick!


The Christmas Covid Challenge 


“It was the week of the 20th of December, everyone was getting PCR tests, sales went crazy and heaps of staff tested positive or were close contacts.

“We paid everyone $60 an hour to come in, there were many sleepless nights, I did about 1000 deliveries myself. We had to go to Coles and Woolworths to buy up hundreds of avocados. 


The key to this business is outstanding Delivery and customer service ! 


The secret sauce in this game 

It’s all about the people 


“Whoever has the most riders will win this game. You need to control the supply and we employ  our riders and plan to give them an outstanding employee experience…. They are the face of our business”

Thursday, January 13, 2022

Solutions by Text ready to rocket



Solutions by Text (SBT) has received an investment of $35m from Edison Partners of Princeton, New Jersey. 

Payments industry leader David Baxter has been appointed as Chief Executive Officer. 

Click below to read more. 


#solutionsbytext #edisonpartners #texting #compliance 

LeaseEagle is acquired by MRI - great exit for Startup Investors


Sydney, Australia – 13 January 2022 – Lee Trevena’s  LeaseEagle, an Australian-based leader providing  technology solutions for commercial property has been acquired by MRI Software for $15 million . 


Seed funds  were raised for this startup in 2005 - with investors being ADI (venture capital arm of BSI ) and Information City  .


What it does 


LeaseEagle’s software is used by over 185 clients to manage over 50,000 locations across Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.


It helps commercial tenants manage lease commitments across multiple real estate assets. The cloud-based platform 

  • reduces the risk of missing critical lease dates ,  
  • makes detailed occupancy analysis simple and provides data-driven reporting for better decision making, 
  • saves time and improves accuracy with automated invoicing and 
  • significantly increases business process efficiency.


LeaseEagle provides organisations with the ability to centralise all lease and franchise information, gain real-time reporting and integrate process automation. 


Lee Trevena shares a powerful message to his stakeholders 

“On behalf of Jason and myself thank you for being such an important and foundational part of the Synetek/LeaseEagle journey to see it arrive to this point. Even after a few days working with MRI myself and the Exec Team are more convinced than ever that MRI is the right home to take LeaseEagle forward into the future. They will provide our customers the best of both worlds by giving them access to some of the world’s best real estate expertise, innovation, client service and support resources while maintaining everything they know and love about LeaseEagle,”


https://www.mrisoftware.com/au/news/mri-software-acquires-leaseeagle-changing-lease-accounting-requirements/

Tuesday, January 11, 2022

Auto Superstores souped up with $6.5m



Founders  Babak Sanayei and Jeff Fu, have grown revenue from startup to $10 million to $15 million range - focussing on NSW - and have raised the funds to expand their range to capture demand for 4x4s, touring products and DIY products and expand into other states 


CVC  is managed by Christian Jensen and Jonathan Pearce and Fifth Estate is led by Daniel Droga, Matthew Kidman and Gary Joffe.

AMS was advised by Mayfair Advisory, while CVC and Fifth Estate used McGrathNicol and Jones Day.

Wednesday, January 05, 2022

The South African Connection


Post by Rouhel Feinstein - 

WHAT AMERICA GAINED AND SOUTH AFRICA LOST !! 

After a quarter century, this small generation of South African immigrants has risen to break through, en masse, into such key leadership roles that they’re changing the US. UTUBE..., PAYPAL, , TESLA...  one of them has led the transition from PCs to cloud computing; another leads the US’s top business school; and another is replacing the space shuttle.

But they’ve done it as individuals, and – with the notable exception of commercial spaceflight pioneer Elon Musk – almost invisibly.

In December, the Silicon Valley Business Journal made a remarkable statement regarding four of their first five winners of the US’s high-tech chief executive officer awards, which feature competition from the likes of Google’s Larry Page.

It said: “Here’s something interesting about our executive of the year awards, something that hadn’t occurred to us at the time that these four executives were selected – they are all originally from South Africa.”

In Silicon Valley alone, South African-born high-tech chief executives include Vinny Lingham, founder of Yola and Gyft; Willem van Biljon, co-founder of Nimbula; and Pieter de Villiers, founder and chief executive of Clickatell, the world’s largest online text messaging service. And these weren’t even among the award winners.

Those include Gauteng brothers Lyndon and Peter Rive, who have built the US’s largest provider of residential clean energy, and Paul Maritz, the outgoing chief executive of cloud computing giant VMware, who was schooled in KwaZulu-Natal.

Impact South African immigrants in the US number only 83 000 – a “small number even for a big city”, says Professor Nancy Foner, an expert on immigration achievement at the City University of New York. So small, she says, that there are almost no figures or studies on their impact. Yet new South African networking organisations, such as the Sable Accelerator in California, are springing up as South Africans are suddenly appearing in front of microphones as chief executives and university deans and scientific research team leaders.

Apart from well-established South African communities in places such as San Diego, or the tight group of professional golfers in Florida, South Africans don’t network the way they do in the United Kingdom. Instead, mutual recognition often happens like this: “Hey, that guy running the University of Notre Dame seems to have a Saffer accent. Come to think of it, so does the dean of Stanford Graduate School of Business. Ja, and what about the guy who was in charge of California’s High-Speed Rail Authority? And with a name like Mahlangu-Ngcobo, that elections judge in Maryland has gotta be from home.”

Pat Soon-Shiong, philanthropist inventor businessman, Cape Town-born of Chinese descent, the son of a shopkeeper, Pat was University of Witwatersrand educated and  is also the owner of The L.A. and part-owner of LA LAKERS 

Some are fairly well known. Pik Botha’s grandson, Roelof, has been ranked as high as 22nd on the Forbes Midas List of venture capitalists, ­having funded the launch of...... YouTube in 2005. 

Among the celebrity conscription-dodgers, singer Dave Matthews probably heads the pack. Matthews was recently declared the US’s most successful touring act of the decade. Remarkable anonymity
But most have risen to the cutting edge of American business with remarkable anonymity. Former Illovo schoolboy Steven Collis, almost unnoticed, has taken the reins of healthcare wholesaling company AmerisourceBergen, listed 29th on the Fortune 500, with 13000 employees, and annual revenues of an almost ridiculous R600-billion. It’s the same story in science. The single greatest breakthrough in cancer treatment in recent years – epigenetic therapy – has been credited to Stellenbosch’s Peter Jones, who now runs a major research center in California.

And another South African, Dr Liam Pedersen, has grabbed what could be the most exotic job in the US. He leads a Nasa research team to develop the brains of “intelligent” space robots that will explore the solar system in search of extraterrestrial life. And to test his “autonomous navigation” systems, Pedersen (42) gets to test the robots in places like Antarctica and alpine lakes in the Andes.
In terms of sheer impact for Africa among transplants, it’s a draw between ex-pats Dr Trevor Mundel and Nomvimbi Meriwether. A former Soweto businesswoman, Meriwether – now the owner of Meticulous Tours travel agency in Washington DC – is the co-founder of multimillion-dollar health and basic education charity in Southern Africa, the Meriwether Foundation. Astonishing over-achievement She told the Mail & Guardian that her fundraising clout in the US enjoyed a major boost in December when her daughter – South African-born Nana Meriwether (27) – won the Miss USA crown.”We are meeting governors, presidents, billionaires, so the plight of [South Africa's] most vulnerable ­children is being heard where it counts,” she said.

Mundel, from Johannesburg, has been appointed as president of global health for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with a grant budget of about R130-billion, and a brief of nothing less than to eradicate polio and malaria from the Earth. But it’s when you consider a professional field as specific as immigration law that the astonishing over-achievement of this group becomes clear.
Bernie Wolfsdorf – another conscription dodger – has been named “the most highly rated immigration lawyer in the world” for the past three years by the peer-reviewed International Who’s Who of Business Lawyers, and South Africa’s Daryl Buffenstein is a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. In the same field, Chris Wright, a transplant from Johannesburg, is described as “Hollywood’s go-to lawyer” – somehow securing “genius” work visas for everyone from Piers Morgan to Playboy playmate Shera Bechard.

The “O-1″ work visa is normally reserved for foreigners of “extraordinary ability”, including Nobel prize, winners, but Wright has controversially expanded its use to include celebrities. South African lawyers have not yet broken through, as a group, as judges in the US’s highest courts, the way they have in, say, Western Australia. But Margaret Marshall (68), a former student leader at Wits, recently retired as chief justice of Massachusetts, where, in a landmark case in 2003, she was the first justice in the US to grant gay couples the right to marry.

Compared to the US’s business world, expatriates have under­achieved in Hollywood itself, but its modest breakthrough artists include Charlize Theron, District 9′s Sharlto Copley and Stelio Savante, who both co-produced and cracked a role opposite Matthew Perry in the comedy The Whole Banana last year.

Building and innovating The poster-child for the 1980s immigration generation is Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX – the rocket company charged with leading the replacement of the space shuttle. In an earlier interview, he told me he left the country in 1988 because the South African Defence Force promised to be “an amazing waste of time”.

John Affleck-Graves, executive vice-president of Notre Dame, Collis and Wright were among those who told me they credit their education for much of their success, but offered few other clues as to why South Africans had risen so sharply. Professor Foner says white South Africans, in particular, had “invisibly” risen to the top.”South Africans [in the US] have gone unnoticed, especially the majority who are white, for whom there were few cultural barriers, if any,” she said. “But I have noticed that South Africans move right into elite circles in the US, immediately, and look where they’ve gone.” Donovan Neale-May, founder of the Sable Accelerator, says the 1980s South African immigrant generation was unique in that they did not take advantage of contacts and mobility through “ethnic communities” in the US, “as, say, Indian entrepreneurs have done so effectively”. Instead, Neale-May says the conscription-avoidance generation had simply outcompeted American professionals with a multitasking combination of management talent, drive and pioneering vision.

Overwhelmingly white phenomenon South African emigration to the US has been an overwhelmingly white phenomenon. According to the Migration Policy Institute in Washington DC, only 14% of South African immigrants – about 11 000 – are black. And they’ve had to travel a far more difficult road, says Foner.

Yet a number of black South Africans have made New World leaps that are, if anything, closer to the purest form of the “American Dream” than their rich white countrymen. Among the exiles who remained in the US, Mahlangu-Ngcobo is one who has emerged as a national force in both government health policy and theology. She has testified on healthcare for the government’s Congressional Black Caucus and, during the violent tumult in Liberia in 1997, she led a workshop there on violence against women. The author of nine books – including research works on Aids and gender equality – Mahlangu-Ngcobo lectures on public health, and has founded both a US church and an international ministry.

Gift Ngoepe, the first black South African to be offered a professional baseball contract, is one of a more recent immigrant generation to the New World. The unlikely sporting story He discovered baseball when his mother took a job as a domestic worker at the Randburg Mets clubhouse. A tiny room inside it later became his home, and he simply practiced against a wall until he was noticed by coaches and, later, a US mentor. Now, he plays professionally as a shortstop within the Pittsburg Pirates organization. Richman Mahlangu (49) has a similarly unlikely sporting story, but, in pursuing it, has carved out a classic, John Steinbeck-style American tale.
He fled apartheid itself at the same time that Musk and others were ­fleeing conscription. Mahlangu’s “hook” into the US was a sports scholarship after he literally discovered the sport of tennis when he found a broken tennis racket on a dusty street in Durban’s Lamontville township in the 1970s. He says that, as with Ngoepe, a local professional coach was so taken by his diligent practice with that racket that he offered free lessons, and, eventually, an introduction to a US mentor. Living in Las Vegas, Mahlangu has since achieved neither riches nor professional-level excellence in his sport.
Instead, he has coached his two sons to the point where, last year, they were both recruited for scholarships by Ivy League universities. His youngest son, Yannik (17), has held a national rank of ninth for his age group and his eldest, Nicholas – now on his way to Harvard – has starred with Andre Agassi in a TV ad.