About Us
Apex Capital Strategies is an active investment management firm, applying professional trading, venture investing, credit underwriting, and portfolio management to digital and traditional assets.
We are focused on delivering attractive performance and client portfolio solutions, deploying the latest technology across our business to help ensure we stay at the forefront of our evolving industry.
Crypto represents disruptive technology, liquid public markets, and new use cases and business models built on top of programmable blockchains.
Navigating this space requires an approach operating at the intersection of cryptography, game theory, network and behavioral economics, competitive strategy, computer science, early stage investing, credit analysis, and portfolio management.
We are a team of venture investors, traders, engineers, credit underwriters, data scientists, operators, and risk managers focused on stewarding capital and helping to responsibly build this globally-connected industry.
We partner with the teams and projects building this paradigm-shifting technology, as investors and as users, from the earliest stages to and through the liquid market journey.
And we use and build blockchain infrastructure to create the future of financial services, including securitizing traditional assets on-chain, and working with real-world credit originators to provide capital and support as they move along their growth path.
Strategy
Asset Capital Strategies (ACS) implements an investment strategy and process which has been developed and practiced in prior portfolios. ACS focuses on the following key characteristics:
ACS seeks investments in the growth markets across all industry sectors including innovation, natural resources, industrial, clean energy, biotechnology, and financial. These industries represent an attractive investment emphasis due to substantial and diverse market opportunities, worldwide sales potential, changing regulatory environments, technological innovations.
ACS uses a systematic investment process for generating superior returns. We also take a disciplined approach throughout each stage of the investment process, from sourcing transaction flow, to screening decisions and due diligence; from structuring and negotiating terms; to working actively with management teams and realizing investment liquidity.
ACS has established a broad range of relationships and contacts, generating a consistent flow of potential investment opportunities. Additionally, we take a pro-active approach to sourcing transactions. In our experience, we’ve found that the best referral opportunities come from company executives and close relationships with investment professionals. Those relationships are fostered by maintaining an active network of individual contacts in the target industries and investment community, regularly reviewing industry journals, and attending as many scientific and industry conferences and trade shows as possible.
In early stage transactions, we’re the catalyst for originating the investment and organizing the financing syndicate. In most mid-to-later stage investments, we get to know a prospective portfolio company and have developed a relationship with management over a period of time. Building these relationships has served us well in prior investments, in ways that include: generating investments on a friendlier basis, achieving more favourable terms, being able to proactively initiate financing on a timely basis and avoid a competitive bidding process.
ACS has established a reputation for credible, honest and straightforward communications, decision-making and advice. This has proven advantageous in those selective investment situations where ACS has been welcomed as investment partners by management teams and co-investors.
The Process
The investment process consists of four thorough and consistent steps, in place to ensure wise investment decisions:
Management teams must be entrepreneurial and experienced in growing companies in their business area. The founding teams will often need to be augmented as the companies develop, and we foresee playing an important role in identifying and attracting key additions to management. The management team in most investments will have a significant ownership stake in their company.
ACS seeks out companies with strategies allowing them to enter a rapidly growing market and establish a dependable leadership position. The forces allowing a new entrant to a market will often be the result of changes to the existing distribution economics, the regulatory structure, or a major change in technology. In each of these cases, the existing market leaders are often constrained in their reaction to the new market landscape by their installed base and by the momentum of their current product offerings, creating an opening for a new company which can focus on the revised market dynamics without having to support an existing business.
As well as having a potential to dominate a niche market position, companies should have unique and superior products and/or services that provide a defensible and proprietary competitive position. This position can be achieved through intellectual property or other proprietary know-how, superior product manufacturing or delivery systems, or any other aspect which can create high barriers to market entry by competitors.
Since market opportunities naturally exist on a worldwide basis in the target industries, ACS will particularly seek companies that have product offerings that can be competitive and effectively distributed in multinational markets. We have a network of contacts which can be helpful to portfolio companies pursuing multinational expansion opportunities.
The Plan
When investing in smaller companies, we will seek opportunities to exercise significant influence on the company and guidance in helping the management team build the business. We will maintain a close working relationship with the company’s management by adding value when needed with product and business strategy, management team development, operations overview, and financial planning.
We are aware that substantial new capital has been committed to the science & technology sector over the past few years, and as a result there are concerns that valuations on investments will escalate as sources of capital compete with one another for deals. The primary mechanism to prevent this from affecting ACS’s returns is to have varied and proprietary sources of investment opportunities combined with a set of objective criteria for judging investment returns.
We will consider factors such as a company’s historic and estimated future performance as it relates to revenues, profits, cash flow, future capital and stock needs, industry trends and private and public comparable equity comparisons in determining an acceptable valuation.
We have developed a systematic process for screening and evaluating potential investments. This process is structured to identify the most compelling opportunities quickly, and eliminate unattractive situations as early as possible. Typically we conduct initial screenings, with a focus on characteristics of management, market dynamics and opportunity, and product attributes and proposed terms of a deal.
The due diligence will draw upon all available resources, both internal and external, to evaluate the criteria which are important to the success of the investment. This will include: full evaluation of the management team; review of market factors such as size, growth opportunity, competition and development trends; full review of proprietary technology content; interviews with customers, professionals, competitors and industry experts; full financial evaluation including analysis of historical results and modeling of various projection scenarios; review and evaluation of operations including R&D, manufacturing, sales and distribution; preparation of a detailed return analysis using several cases of financial performance and exit timing.
We structure transactions as simply and straightforwardly as possible, and negotiate openly but firmly. We have considerable experience and expertise in successfully negotiating and closing transactions on favorable investor terms. Focus is maintained on obtaining those terms relevant to valuation and liquidity, and to protecting the client’s interests in the event of future difficulties, rather than relying on elaborate structures or complex financial engineering.
While we will be able to influence and add value in each investment, our input may vary depending on the stage and circumstances unique to each company. Our team can draw upon a broad range of skills and experience in providing assistance to portfolio companies, including: helping build management teams; assisting in the development of business and product strategy; helping set and monitor priorities and operating goals; planning expansion into international markets; evaluating and securing strategic partnerships; assisting in planning and securing additional financing.
The Principals intend to be active members on the board of directors and key board committees of some portfolio companies. We expect that this process will result in a limit on the number of investments we make.
Our active involvement in companies in our portfolio will be important in managing and influencing the exit strategy and timing appropriate for each investment. We will consider possible exit scenarios as part of each investment immediately from the initial screening and furthermore we will evaluate and plan for liquidity options throughout the investment period.
Chairman
CEO
Why Choose Us
