I + E Connect Third Party Capital Investment Attraction Research

Summary

Artesian Venture Partners (AVP) is a specialized investment manager with a unique, highly scalable, diversified portfolio approach to early stage venture capital investments, targeting both financial and strategic returns for HNWI, corporates and institutional investors.

AVP’s approach provides investors with a pipeline of pre-screened and de-risked startup investment opportunities in which to make larger, late-stage investments. AVP provides a white-label platform solution to enable investors to become their own VC.

AVP’s early stage VC funds include the Sydney Angels Sidecar Funds 1 & 2, BlueChilli Venture Fund, Slingshot Venture Fund, Clean Energy Seed Fund (with the CEFC as cornerstone investor), the UoW iAccelerate Seed Fund, the Sproutx AgTech Venture Fund and the Australian Venture Capital Fund of Funds.

AVP also founded VentureCrowd, Australia’s leading equity crowdfunding platform, to provide access to AVP’s prescreened, curated late-stage deals (on a fractional basis) to wholesale, and eventually, retail investors.

MLA Donor Company Limited (MDC) is a fully-owned subsidiary of Meat & Livestock Australia.

MDC attracts commercial investment from individual enterprises and others that share a mutual interest with MLA to co-invest in innovation that will benefit the Australian red meat and livestock industry.

Since it began in 1999, MDC has attracted investment from every part of the red meat and livestock value chain, including processors, value-adders, breed societies, large pastoral companies, international collaborators and technology providers.

The Australian Government matches voluntary partner contributions in projects that address industry and government priorities and benefit the Australian community.

The MDC Innovation & Entrepreneurship (I+E) Connect Platform was conceived to fast track the delivery of commercially viable solutions that create unique and defendable competitive positions through the creation of strategic relationships across the global entrepreneurial community to attract and support high growth disruptive entrepreneurial activity within the Australian red meat sector through achieving the following:

• Developing future technology opportunities
• Fast tracking the next generation of “big ideas”
• Becoming a “magnet for the ag tech, food tech and food industries
• Creating a new innovation marketplace for agile SMEs and start ups
• Attracting new capital and new investors

A critical design component of the I + E Connect platform is the attraction of high quality third party capital through new financial instruments to enable greater co-invest across the innovation and new venture development continuum from early stage to commercialization. AVP will conduct research on different capital investment attraction instruments specifically within Australia and Asia with the objective of generating potential matched investment opportunities and identify possible co-investment partners.

AVP will propose model(s) to increase co-investment activity into relevant Ag/Food startups that may attract matched funding from MDC. The research will identify and map all potential ecosystem partners that can optimise the goals of the I+E Connect Platform and create the highest quality flow of co-investment deal flow. This will include proposed models for ongoing acceleration and support of start-ups - either not part of an existing accelerator program or at later or scale-up stage of growth. This may be through an MDC controlled initiative, an outsourced solution, or some combination of both.