If you are even remotely close to being a startup enthusiast (which translates into reading The Tech Portal daily !), you’d know the kind of impact AngelList has had, in connecting startups with relevant pool of investors — or syndicates as they say.
Now, leveraging the power of AngelList’s massive expertise in the startup-investor match making domain, China’s third largest private equity firm China Science & Merchants Investment Management Group — which has a whopping $12 Bn of funds under management — has chosen AngelList to power up a $400 Million fund, specifically for early stage investments.
At that value and that scale, the new fund — named CSC Upshot — will quite rightly become the biggest ever fund assembled for investments into early-stage/pre-Series A companies. The fund will be independent of AngelList in every sense, but will be used to fund top syndicates on the AngelList platform.
Speaking on the development, AngelList’s co-founder Naval Ravikant said,
Firms often raise more money to get more fees. But with our model, we can just add more syndicate leads so we can keep putting money into the same kind of companies at the same stage. CSC Upshot is about Chinese LPs expanding globally and showing that Chinese companies can go out globally and compete in a way that gets them exposure at the very earliest stage, instead of waiting for the Series D round.
AngelList has, till date, facilitated $205 million in investments across 650 startups including Uber and many other major names, and will expand even further with this fresh funding partnership with CSC Upshot.
AngelList has helped the fund pick out 50 of the top leads on the platform, who already have a track record of identifying high-performing deals. Apart from these 50 leads, CSC Upshot has its own internal tools integrated into the AngelList platform to vote together on whether to follow a deal or not.
If you’re unaware of what “syndicates” are, they are actually a newly coined model by AngelList, which helps socially active and well-connected angel investors pool in more money by spreading up in their personal network. Today, AngelList has 4,400 investors operating across 165 syndicates.
This new firm pretty much represents the trend which Chinese investors have been currently pursuing — invest more into companies outside China Mainland and specially in the US. This is a bid to combat both — growing competition in the Chinese market and increase Chinese financial dominance within the US startup and new-age companies.
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