2021 Deep Dive on the Greater China’s Burgeoning Venture Capital Ecosystem

Over the years, White Star Capital has published reports on our core markets including Canada, France, Germany, UK and the US East Coast but in 2018 with our second fund we expanded to Asia, and subsequently also published deep dives on the Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia tech ecosystems.

Now, we are delighted to share our newest report covering the Greater China Venture Capital ecosystem. Whilst China is not a key focus market for us, given its position as the second-largest tech ecosystem globally and its increasing influence…

White Star Capital and DAOs

The strategy of venture capital is evolving beneath our feet at this very moment. The introduction of crypto networks and token-based projects has ushered in a new era for industry-defining businesses.

With the recent launch of our Digital Asset Fund, a dedicated $50 million vehicle created to invest in digital assets and Web3, we’ve expanded White Star Capital’s scope to include digital assets and tokens.

With a global perspective in mind from the inception of White Star Capital’s investment platform, truly global, decentralized networks seemed like a natural progression for us. …

We’re happy to announce that we are leading Novisto’s US$8m Series A round. Headquartered in Montreal, Novisto is on a mission to democratize state-of-the-art ESG data monitoring, reporting and insight across the globe.

In the last 12 months, more than 50 major corporations, including Amazon, Walmart, General Motors, and FedEx, have announced plans to be carbon neutral or negative by 2040 in an effort to curb climate change. With growing pressure from investors, regulators, consumers and employees to act on ESG data, corporate executives across industries have made the mission of improving their practices one of their top priorities. …

TL;DR

• Chinese live video streaming companies have now reached over $700bn in combined market value, led by ByteDance & Kuaishou.
• Asia-based companies such as ByteDance and Asia Innovations Group (“AIG”) are bringing best-in-class Eastern live video streaming practices to the West.
• AIG’s “live social” portfolio includes Uplive, the leading independent global live video streaming platform.
• We were among the first western investors in AIG, participated in their first round, Series A in 2014, and again led a late-stage expansion round in 2020.

In 2013, Youtube, Instagram and Snapchat all launched video sharing features that played an instrumental role in their rise…

Looking back at our investment from Seed to IPO

We are thrilled to share that our portfolio company Safello went public today on the Nasdaq First North after a successful and highly oversubscribed pre-IPO fundraising round.

Safello is a tech-enabled digital asset brokerage that enables the buying and selling of cryptocurrencies in a safe and compliant environment. Since its launch in 2013, the company’s mission has been to democratize the adoption of cryptocurrencies with full transparency and regulation at the forefront.

We were early believers in the Digital Asset sector, having invested in Cryex in 2014. However, due to an…

About White Star Capital:

White Star Capital is a global multi-stage technology investment platform that invests in exceptional entrepreneurs building ambitious, international businesses. Operating out of New York, London, Paris, Montreal, Toronto, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, our presence, perspective, and people enable us to partner closely with founders to help them scale internationally from Series A onwards.

About the role:

The Canada Investment Team is looking for a Summer/Fall Analyst (June 2021 to December 2021 — flexible on end date) to work with us on sourcing, sector research, due diligence, and investment decision making. …

Debt is everywhere (and that’s not a bad thing)

Where does our notion of debt come from? Anthropologist David Graeber illustrates in his book numerous examples of implicit credit systems that greased social and commercial relationships around the world, long before fiat currency was introduced. At the core of our modern economies, IOUs in the form of debt still power the circulation of resources and value creation. Debt markets have been a long standing pillar of capitalism whether through the bond securitization craze of Salomon Brothers and Drexel Burnham in the late 80s, the rise of P2P lending by Lending…

In our 2020 Southeast Asia Venture Capital Report, we explored the underlying macroeconomic and demographic trends that have driven Southeast Asia’s real GDP per capita to grow four times faster than the world average, leading to a large, rapidly growing affluent middle-class and thriving tech ecosystem [1].

These attractive fundamentals in Southeast Asia led to our first investment in the region in 2020, the $18m Series B of Pop Meals (formerly known as Dahmakan), a Malaysian food delivery platform focused on using a tech-enabled approach to target the mass-market — “popular meals at even more popular prices”.

Our conviction rests…