Cohen heads east to ‘swing big’ with venture investments
Hedge fund manager Steve Cohen is bringing his passion for tech startups to Asia, along with his checkbook.
Point72 Ventures, which invests mostly the billionaire’s money in early-stage companies, is starting to evaluate prospects on the continent after putting millions of dollars into start-ups in the Americas and Europe.
Asia presents a chance to “swing big” because it’s unburdened by technological infrastructure, particularly in financial services, said Matthew Granade, who oversees investments at the venture-capital arm of Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management. Many parts of the developed world, such as the US, spent decades to build such infrastructure, making it harder for them to adapt, he said.
“Here, when suddenly you have a huge population moving into the middle class that was never served before and no technologies that were available to support them, you could just build from scratch and leapfrog,” Pete Casella, who leads the venture capital firm’s investments in financial services technologies, said during an interview he gave together with Granade last month in Singapore.
The value of private-equity transactions in Asia reached the highest in at least six years in 2017, EY said in its Private Equity Capital Briefing in February. In Southeast Asia alone, this year “is already off to a phenomenal start,” the consulting firm said in a separate report. Deals worth more than $17 billion were completed in January in the region, about triple the $5.9 billion value reached in all of 2017.