Equiam wraps up second quantitative venture fund

Equiam has closed its second quantitative venture fund at $50 million. Based in San Francisco, Equiam is a data-powered venture capital manager focused on democratizing venture investing.

PRESS RELEASE

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–EQUIAM, a data-powered, venture capital manager with a mission to democratize venture investing, has announced the close of its second private fund, the EQUIAM Private Alpha Fund, with assets under management of $50 million. The Private Alpha Fund uses the EQUIAM Systematic Ranking (ESR), which applies a suite of proprietary algorithms to distill approximately 10,000 private companies and 10 million data points into an evolving, ranked list of approximately 30 investment targets. In addition to offering diversified access to growth and late-stage companies, the Private Alpha Fund deploys capital faster and allows for a comparatively shorter fund duration and a faster path to liquidity than most traditional venture capital funds.

“EQUIAM’s Private Alpha Fund marks a new era in growth and late-stage venture investing, where data-powered investment signals replace gut feel,” says Ziad Makkawi, Founder and CEO of EQUIAM. “The interest in our pioneering, quantitative approach from both institutions and individual investors shows that quantitative, risk-managed investing is the future of venture capital, where data availability continues to grow exponentially. We expect demand for VC 2.0 to continue growing, and we are building out our investment and distribution capabilities to meet it.”

EQUIAM adds to investment and operations teams with three new hires
Laxus Tat has joined as Investment Engineer with experience automating and optimizing portfolio management using a variety of technologies, building dynamic asset allocation models, analyzing investing strategies and controlling portfolio exposure for different risk factors. Tat’s previous experience includes AssetMark and Los Angeles Capital Management. He holds a Masters of Financial Engineering from the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Samantha Chow has joined as a Senior Associate, Operations, bringing experience in fund operations, reporting and accounting. Her previous experience includes Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Northern Trust Hedge Fund Services. She is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Later this month, Shachi Shah will begin her role as Director, Strategic Operations, drawing on experience managing business operations and leveraging data analytics to accelerate start-up businesses. She joins from Plug and Play Tech Center and previously held roles at ICICI Bank and as a founder of Craftsy. She earned a postgraduate diploma in management from the University of California, Berkeley and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

About data-powered, risk-managed venture investing
The EQUIAM Systematic Ranking (ESR) engine drives EQUIAM’s investment process. ESR draws information on an investable universe of more than 10,000 private companies and generates investment signals designed to identify companies with ample, high-quality data, well-established revenues, efficient use of capital and a higher probability of outperformance. ESR is designed to enable EQUIAM to consider a larger opportunity set and construct larger, more diversified portfolios than most traditional venture capital (VC) funds. ESR signals are also designed to avoid overvalued companies during portfolio construction and identify poor performing portfolio constituents for potential divestment.

EQUIAM’s operational model seeks to deploy capital faster than many traditional venture capital funds resulting in a comparatively shorter fund duration of four years and a relatively short two-year reinvestment period, and liquidity from any exit afterwards. To access the companies highly-ranked by the ESR algorithms, EQUIAM has built broad sourcing capabilities that include private secondary marketplaces, issuers, VC firms and primary funding rounds. The EQUIAM Funds also have lower minimum investment than is often required for venture capital fund investments and provide exposure to some of today’s most sought after late-stage private companies.

“Our approach has attracted the interest of larger institutions who see the parallels with data-powered investing in the public markets,” continued Makkawi. “Individuals and many family offices, on the other hand, have typically been unfairly locked out of venture capital investing until now. These ‘unventured’ investors recognize that extensive value-creation is taking place today during the decade or more that the average company remains private. The booming secondary market for private companies demonstrates this increasing investor interest, and we believe the market is in the beginning stages of exponential growth.”

About EQUIAM
EQUIAM is a data-powered VC manager that has pioneered a quantitative approach to constructing risk-managed portfolios of growth and late-stage private companies. EQUIAM funds are designed to offer diversified access, faster capital deployment and a shorter path to liquidity than many traditional venture fund investments. EQUIAM’s first fund, the EQUIAM Private Tech30 Fund held its first closing on February 15, 2019 and its final closing on June 30, 2019. Given the success of the EQUIAM Private Tech30 Fund, EQUIAM launched the EQUIAM Private Alpha Fund. The recently closed Private Alpha Fund uses the proprietary ESR process to analyze the investable universe of growth and late-stage private technology companies. Combined, the two funds represent almost $90 million in assets under management as of June 7, 2021. A third fund is planned for late 2021.