Alliance Partners

Monday, October 31, 2022

Flying electrical vehicles around the corner - Jetsons here we come


The age of airborne vehicles might be just around the corner, and Air EV is leading the way. The Israel-based startup has created the Air One, a two-seat electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle made exclusively for the private market. Priced similar to a high-end luxury car, the Air One can be parked on the owners’ premises, not at an airport or heliport. It has been designed by top industry professionals to be remarkably simple for individuals to fly, and will require only a basic license. By targeting private owners/operators, Air EV has fewer barriers to implementation, both in terms of certification and operation. The company already has paid pre-orders and expects to start deliveries in the second half of 2024. 

@ourcrowd 

Sunday, October 30, 2022

Has Elon Musk “freed the bird” or created a Scavenger?



Elon Musk buys Twitter for $44b nabbing 240 million daily users and becomes the “Chief Twit “ and fires the CEO, CFO and Legal officer !


Current share price $25b - 

While Amazon , meta and google shed double digit drops from their share price


The Twitter Punt

  • Can he get them to pay $6 per month and do away with advertising? 
  • Can he turn it to provide WeChat functionality ? 
  • Could Twitter become the new WeChat - creating a  common digital town square
  •  can Musk make it the next trillion dollar business ? 

A few fellow billionaires and a Qatari sovereign-wealth fund think so ! 

Thursday, October 27, 2022

Square Peg closes another $500m fund

Paul Bassat and his team at Square Peg have closed another $500m fund!!!

Congrats 

A great time to invest in great companies and favourable valuations !!!

Maybe allocate a bit to a be a “fund of funds” to incubation funds -  who can seed startups with between 50k to 500k 
Maybe matched with government money?







Tuesday, October 25, 2022

Zoomcar - an Ourcrowd Investment - receives $10m

          



Ourcrowd portfolio company Zoomcar, the world’s largest emerging-market focused car-sharing platform, and Innovative International Acquisition Corp. (NASDAQ: IOAC), a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company, announced that they have entered into a definitive merger agreement that will result in Zoomcar becoming a publicly listed company. 

The transaction values the combined company at an implied pro forma enterprise value of approximately $456M.

 Upon closing, the company will be renamed Zoomcar Holdings, Inc. and expects to list its common stock on Nasdaq. 

In addition, and simultaneously with the execution of the merger agreement, Ananda Trust, an affiliate of Innovative International, has invested $10M in Zoomcar.

About Zoomcar
Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Bengaluru, India, Zoomcar is the leading marketplace for car sharing across India, Southeast Asia and the MENA region, with over 25,000 cars currently available to guests using its platform. 

The Zoomcar community connects vehicle owners with guests, who choose from a selection of cars for use at affordable prices, promoting sustainable, smart transportation solutions in growing markets.

 Uri Levine, the co-founder of mobility unicorns Waze and Moovit, currently serves as Chairman of Zoomcar’s Board of Directors. 

About Innovative International Acquisition Corp. 
Innovative is a blank check company incorporated as a Cayman Islands exempted company for the purpose of effecting a merger, share exchange, asset acquisition, share purchase, reorganization or similar business combination with one or more businesses.

 Innovative’s management, comprises of Dr. Mohan Ananda, Madan Menon and Elaine Price, along with a board of directors that builds on its ability, experience and network with cross border transactions and strategic growth, sought to partner with a technology company that had a global footprint with a focused global growth strategy. 

Innovative conducted a successful IPO in October of 2021, in which it raised $235 million. Innovative’ s investment thesis was to find a company which had a history of positive growth, a clear path to profitability, a strong defensible market position coupled with a culture of inclusion, diversity, and environmental responsibility. 

Innovative sought advice from several leading firms to assist with a thorough diligence process prior to entering into the Merger Agreement.


Contacts
Zoomcar
Investors: 
Michael Bowen
zoomcarIR@icrinc.com
Media:
Surabi Shetty
surabi.shetty@zoomcar.com
Brad Burgess
zoomcarpr@icrinc.com

Innovative International Acquisition Corp.
Dr. Mohan Ananda, Chairman &CEO
mohan@innovativeacquisitioncorp.com



Monday, October 24, 2022

Inke - A unicorn in the making?



26 year old Founder of Packaging platform Inke, Jordan Shreeve has signed up the likes of Google, Microsoft ,  Uber, Mecca, Lululemon and Cotton On Group. 


It has been self funded with $20k and Jordan owns 100% of the company 


What it does 

The brands upload their own packaging design, or find a designer via 99designs, and select from a range of packages, or custom make their own. 


The platform is a hub - connecting customers with a local manufacturer and is designed to support smaller orders, but for companies wanting more than 3000 packages at a time, the Inke team manually facilitate the order.


While working for a packaging problem  - he difficulty of a brand who wanted a package!!


Inke has a network of 10 to 15 suppliers and is looking to go global .


Inke has now filled more than 8500 orders for big and small brands, and forecasts it will double revenue to $8 million this financial year.


How Covid helped 


When COVID hit, a lot of brands had to look for local suppliers when supply chains were hit ... and brands that didn’t do any e-commerce, all of a sudden were and needed branded packaging - enter Inke!


Looking to find capital and help to Grow 

Jason said this to Yolande Redrup of AFR

“I see how big the opportunity is and how big this company can become,” he said. “You see what the big mobs are turning over who are targeting the high end of the market, and they’re leaving the bottom end untouched.

“If we can service the rest of the industry, this company could grow exponentially, but it requires resources to do that.”


Yolande Redrup of AFR

Thursday, October 13, 2022

SunDrive Nab’s $21m from blue chip Climate tech investors



Founders David Hu and Vince Allen Of Solar Disrupter Sun Drive has nabbed the whole who of investors in their latest $2m round 


Investors include 

  • Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull
  • Canva co-founder Cameron Adams 
  • Atlassian s Mike Cannon-Brookes 
  • Blackbird Ventures
  •  Chinese-Australian solar pioneer Dr Shi Zhengrong
  • Bill Bartee’s Main Sequence - CSIROs Innovation fund
  • Ian Learmonth’s - Clean Energy Finance Corporation (government funded 

What it does 

SunDrive co-founder designed a solar cell that uses copper rather than silver paste in the electrode lines; an innovation that will make cells cheaper , scalable but also more efficient 


The Pain 

Local manufacturing would help break China’s stranglehold on the Australian solar panel market, which currently Supplies more than 80 per cent of Australian panels.


The painkiller 

Sun drive plans to revolutionise the onshore mass production of solar cells and the development of an Australian solar manufacturing industry. Improving sovereign manufacturing capability will increase Australia’s resilience to supply chain disruptions and further enable the uptake of solar PV,


What the money will be used for 

SunDrive will use the $21 million to build a pilot production line to help accelerate its plan to mass manufacture solar panels in Australia.


Source Peter Ker of AFR. https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/turnbull-makes-a-push-for-hydro-in-the-hunter-20220331-p5a9nv 

Wednesday, October 12, 2022

What a great story - blackbird invests in Soul Æther





Phoebe Harrop of Blackbird shares her story


Blackbird Aotearoa’s has lead the investment in the pre-seed round for Soul Æther, founded by Ben Forman, Kat Lintott and Kris Hermansson 


Investors include Tom Staggs (CEO of Candle Media and Disney’s former COO and CFO), Matt Dravitski (Weta Digital), and Icehouse Ventures.


What it does


 Soul Æther is a new kind of media company that builds a portfolio of products around a single storyverse, delivered digitally, for a global fanbase. 


Soul Æther is creating a world that empowers its audience in the real world. Its themes explore gender diversity, racial diversity and living in balance with the environment, reincarnation, allowing characters who would traditionally be older and wiser to be played by young characters who have tapped into the history of their past - allowing Soul Æther to explore character dimensions that haven’t traditionally been seen on screens.


How it does it


Coupling traditional media (graphic novel, a web series, feature film) with new means of engaging fans (NFTs, a community <> creator Discord) allows Soul Æther to unlock a deeper fandom flywheel.

For example, with its initial character NFT drop—

Soul Æther fans will gain utility:

  • Because blockchains are programmable, Soul Æther can endow their NFTs with features that enable them to expand their purpose over time, or even to provide direct utility to their holders. NFTs can be structured to do things — or let their owners do things — in both digital spaces and in the physical world.

Their interaction will be two-way:

  • Engaged NFT-holders will be able to directly shape the unfolding Soul Æther story, feeling a sense of involvement - and therefore ownership - that represents a step-change in the fandom experience

The project benefits from a referral effect:

  • As with any new product, early adopters serve as product evangelists and a source of early feedback. With NFTs, these users also serve an even more essential role: Their decision to embrace the NFTs quite literally imbues those NFTs with their meaning and establishes their initial value. Communities built in this way are like sports fans who own their clubs' players.

For fans, it’s religion with rewards:

  • As the project grows in popularity, NFTs grow in value, so evangelism is directly incentivised. Soul Æther will allow members to:
  • Earn Element and Memory NFTs which they can use or sell on the marketplace
  • Get early access to future Soul Æther NFT drops
  • Monetise world assets: rental of spaces, staking of elements, staking of characters


Our vision is to build an inter-influenced story world that covers film, television, graphic novels, games, mixed reality, the multiverse and everything in between. This world will be developed through a phased creative approach, however we want to co-create this world with the community who believe in it; shaping the direction and creation together as it evolves.” - Ben


It’s about being able to create your story around a theme . 


Examples of other companies 

  • League of Legends, one of the most played online games (with 2021 annual revenue of ~US$1.4B), released the animated show Arcane to give stories to its in-game characters to critical and popular acclaim on Netflix. 


Fans have a hand in what gets made:

  • The Legend of Vox Machina was released on Amazon Prime this year as the animated show extension of Critical Role, an improvised series where voice actors play Role Player Games such as Dungeons & Dragons. This was driven and funded by fans: the creator-owned production company raised US$11M in 45 days via Kickstarter, taking the record for Kickstarter’s most funded TV/movie project, and their seventh-most funded project full stop. 


Fans create some of the content:

  • The Star Wars universe (which was sold to Disney under Lucasfilms for US$4.05B in 2012) is built on over 5,000 distinct media items. Wookieepedia (the fan-written Star Wars wiki) has over 170,000 distinct pages (the official Lucasfilm Star Wars world database (“The Holocron”) has 55,000). When fans love a world, story, characters, and community, they can and will expand it.


Distribution of content via social media 

  • content-producers are getting viral through social media -TikTok star Charli D’Amelio has organically grown a 138 million-strong following off the back of self-made and distributed content. 
  • TV, radio, cinema, and physical stores is old media distribution! 

Why Blackbird Invested 


Blackbird exists to supercharge ANZ’s most ambitious founders: the wild hearts with the wildest of ideas.


Soul Æther is such an idea. It doesn't make widgets or sell software subscriptions. But it has the fresh and different potential for magic that we look for in early-stage companies. 


Sam captured it best when she reflected:

"Technology, at its heart, is someone who does intellectual work to create an asset that can compound in value over time. Sometimes those assets are an autonomous vehicle, or knowhow around a new rocket engine, or a digital design platform… What they all have in common is that they have durability and ability to compound. Soul Æther also has that potential. Disney is still making money off sketches that were done by hand 100 years ago."


The opportunity is massive: the market for virtual goods and services was $880M in 2004, now it's $80 billion - a 100x increase.


"This is probably how George Lucas would have built the Star Wars universe in 2022" says Phoebe Harrop of Blackbird.


Blackbird are delighted to welcome Soul Æther’s band of storytellers to the Blackbird whānau. Learn more and watch the trailer here.


Nau mai, haere mai ki te whānau


https://www.linkedin.com/posts/blackbirdvc_investment-notes-soul-%C3%A6ther-blackbird-activity-6985417847858479104-eqeC?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios



Monday, October 10, 2022

40 Climate Focussed Funds



Ali Rohde  has compiled a list of 40 ClimateTech VCs - great work! See list on link below 

Despite the overall market slowdown, VC interest in climatetech has continued to stay strong — especially as extreme weather events like Hurricane Ian happen more and more frequently and wreak havoc across the globe.


Case in point: Though deal count is down from 2021 levels — a year many agree is an outlier in the VC world — 2022 is on track to beat 2020 as the second-hottest year for climatetech investment.


For those taking the leap and building something new, we put together a list of 🚨 40 VC funds focused on backing climatetech founders at the early stage. 🚨


Included are funds like Collaborative Fund, Social Impact Capital, Obvious Ventures, Third Sphere, Voyager Ventures, Powerhouse, Lowercarbon Capital, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Emerson Collective, and more.


Founders, operators, and technologists interesed in the space should also check out Work on Climate, an action-oriented Slack community for people serious about climate work.


Here is the list - thank you Ali Rhode 

https://outsetcapital.com/writing/posts/climatetech

Tuesday, October 04, 2022

Investible backs Kite Magnetics - expecting a home run


Congratulations to Dr Richard Parsons and the team at Kite Magnetics on their seed round to develop lightweight electric motors for use in aviation, helping the airline industry decarbonise.


The material used is Aeroperm,  could  also be useful to the automotive industry, in cars such as Teslas, 


“Any weight reduction, even if it’s only 100 kilos in the motor, is important. It might let you fly 100 kilometers farther, or it might let you carry 100 kilos more cargo,” said Dr Parsons 


$1.85m  has been raised from Investible as well as receiving support from the $2 billion Breakthrough Victoria fund, supporting  local companies developing technology for health, sustainable food production and decarbonisation.


Tom Kline, who co-manages the $100 million fund at Investible, says that he believes that   “impact” investments that help tackle climate change, will make significant returns for its investors 


Other start-ups backed by Investible’s Climate Tech Fund include 


  • ZeroJet, a New Zealand company that makes electric propulsion systems for boats and
  • Xylo Systems, which makes a software platform that can be used to track and manage wildlife conservation projects.


The fund plans to invest in about 50 early-stage companies.


https://dragoninkhouse.com/investable-backs-kite-magnetics-and-7-other-climate-tech-companies/

Monday, October 03, 2022

The rocks of Attitude, Anger, Agility and Appreciation




It was Nietzsche who said: There will always be rocks in the road ahead of us. They will be stumbling blocks or skipping stones – it depends on how we view them and use them .

 

My friend , Rabbi Ralph Genende shares  4 profound and powerful lessons about living, love and leadership and the 4 A’s that help us navigate our way on the rocky road through the wilderness of life.


Attitude 

Attitude shapes your reality. 


Life is constantly throwing up obstacles in our way - it’s how we deal with them that helps us grow from a pebble to a boulder! 

 

  • How do you change a negative emotion or feeling to a positive one ?
  • How do you turn lemon into lemonade ?
  • How do you look at a situation with the glass half full lense?

 

Everyone gets negative thoughts 

  • the learned helplessness, 
  • the sense that I’m a failure or not good enough 
  • that things will never change, 
  • the over emphasis on the negatives, 
  • the tendency to blame others for our predicament, 
  • the catastrophising or expecting the worst no matter what.

Even the best of us - lose our cool and calm head and positivity 


Moses lost it 

Even Moses succumbed to the negative in the situation, worn out by 40 years of wandering around in the desert, his peers dying around him including the recent loss of his beloved sister. 


In his grief, he lost his cool and calm head and his energetic and upbeat approach. 


He forgot that it’s his attitude and not his aptitude that determines his altitude.

Viktor Frankl - survived 

In his famous book mans search for meaning - that Tony Robbins quotes - he survives the concentration camps by having a life affirming attitude. Living for something bigger than himself .


He would quote Nietzsche that he who has a why to live, can live with almost any how.

 

Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky 

He sustained himself in prison particularly by the verse from Psalm 23: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for you with me.”


With cool heads, warm hearts and the spirit of our tradition we will find a way to help ourselves and our wounded world through these times.


We need to have an attitude of hope and faith even as we faced fear and loss, trials and tribulations. 


 Anger 


Anger is a natural feeling and alerts us to things that aren’t just right. 


Repressed anger doesn’t disappear, it just goes underground - it festers, feeds on itself and when ignited becomes like a wild and dangerous bush fire.


Anger needs to be acknowledged ,  processed and express in a measured, appropriate and considered way. 


This is the difference between uncontrollable, violent rage and acceptable and necessary anger. 


Anger for me has been very hard to control …. 

 

Moses became angry - and was punished 

It was more than just a failure of nerve for the embattled leader - it was also a loss of equilibrium. 


A loss of his cool and calm head in a moment of blazing anger. 


He lashed out at the people angrily calling them rebels, but in his rage he also hits the rock instead of speaking to it and strikes it not once, but twice…

 

Sometimes we do need to respond immediately with anger, for example to gross injustice, abuse, unacceptable behaviour, unfairness or ugliness. 


But it’s an anger we are fully aware of and also in control of.

 

Fury is a destructive force, it can destroy and undermine both the perpetrator and the victim. It can undermine the best of leaders, the wisest of heads, the kindest of souls. 


The Torah’s suggests “ When you are angry you should attempt to speak, not hit or burst out in rage, but beware of those extreme and unwise comments. “


Ghandi says that “if you are wrong - you have no right to be angry 

And if you are right - you have no need to be angry “ 


Agility 

Slaves understand that with a command comes a brutal stick. 


Free men and women don’t respond to force and coercion but to words and persuasion. 


Moses who led a slave generation for 40 years was not the man to lead free people across Jordan. 


To stay relevant you need to have the capacity to adapt and change in the face of change.

 

The right response in one age or situation  may be wrong in the next. 


We need to be flexible, creative and adaptive.  It’s the agile that survive !!


What is the core mission , what are the core rocks or values that you stand for? Should these change?


How can we contribute to the conversation of humanity, sharing ideas and things with others, letting others share this with us.

 

It’s all about attitude, agility and anger management, but there’s also one more A - 


Appreciation

Be grateful - thank before you think - such a powerful tool !!!


A challenge - so beautifully expressed in Naomi Shemer’s song on the honey and the sting, the bitter and the sweet - like a tomn yum soup ! 


A stumbling block is also sometimes a stepping stone…. Be grateful for the challenges - you grow through adversity 


Gratitude  is about appreciating  the positive things that are right here right now in our lives. 


That’s why we savour the sweetness of honey and apples at our family tables, 


That’s why we say the prayer Modeh Ani every morning - as Robbi Sacks said. -thank before you  think . 

 

That’s why we say a special blessing שהחיינו on Rosh Hashanah. Thank you God for this superb day and  occasion you have given us, 


That we are here together as a community, 


That we have lived through and survived these last few horrendous years.

 

“Baruch Atah Hashem Elokeinu Melech HaOlam Sheh- hecheyanu Ve kiyemanu Ve hegeyanu Lazman Hazeh!!


We bless You God who has sustained us, nurtured us, and brought us to this marvellous time!!

 

Gemar Chatimah Tovah”

 

 

Rabbi Ralph