In 2009, I co-founded Venture Capital Partners (which subsequently became VCP Advisors), a corporate finance and alternative asset management advisory company, launched initially in London, UK. At the time, we saw an opportunity to take advantage of the global financial crisis, and help great companies and investment managers, that were struggling due to the financial climate, to raise capital. Over the next 10 years VCP grew into a leading global financial business with regulated offices in London, New York, Hong Kong, Shanghai and a sister company with offices in Tokyo and Seoul.
With on the ground investment teams globally located and a fantastic set of well-known and high profile shareholders and advisors, VCP continues today, accessing some of the very best investment opportunities, as well as alternative sources of institutional, family office and high net worth capital globally.
With proprietary access to leading Alternative Investment Opportunities (Venture Capital, Private Equity, Private Credit, Infrastructure, Real Estate, Hedge Funds) and comprehensive capital distribution capabilities, we saw an opportunity to build a new financial technology business, called Bite Investments.
Bite is focused on providing high net worth investors and their advisors, the ability to access and invest into leading alternative investment opportunities in a seamless and efficient way, through the use of technology.
Alternative assets under management are rising at an exponential rate. Investors have become increasingly frustrated with traditional asset classes (equities and fixed income) and have therefore been making larger allocations into alternative asset classes. Despite this, many investors, particularly high net worth investors still cannot get access or are not investing into alternative assets.
This is because of 3 key reasons:
1) The buy-ins (initial investment amount) to the very best funds are extremely high (sometimes $10m+);
2) Many of the best alternative funds are illiquid in nature and require investors to lock their capital up for a long time (sometimes up to 10 years);
3) Many investors cannot get access to the top decile returning funds (it’s not about investing into alternatives but into the very best managers).
BITE completed its an angel financing round on October 1st 2019, backed by some leading Chinese venture capital managers. Recently Bite has closed on a Pre-Series A funding round, corner stoned by Apex, which is the largest private equity fund administrator globally, and 5th largest globally for alternative assets, with 45 offices, 3500 employees.
BITE is therefore now backed by some of the leading investors in Alternatives, Finance, and Technology and has an exceptional team located across the globe in Nanjing, Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, London, New York, Lisbon and the Cayman Islands. Market turmoil notwithstanding, there appears to be a lot of excitement about what Bite Investments is doing, particularly in Asia, as the traditional and alternative wealth management markets seek to accelerate the digitalization of their services in the face of travel and in-person-meeting restrictions.
As a result, we have seen an increase in inbound inquiries from both investors and advisors. In addition, against a backdrop of acute volatility in equity and fixed income markets, we expect demand for alternative investments to grow significantly, just as they did after 2008. We hope to capitalize on this as we scale towards our Series A and beyond.
About Bite Investments
Bite Investments provide a seamless end-to-end investment process. Our investor solutions software enables asset managers to provide a fully digital user service to their investor base, whilst our online investment platform allows the full spectrum of investors to invest in top-tier alternative investment funds in a streamlined process.
