Early-stage investment vehicle, the Punakaiki Fund, has raced past the $30 million mark – or about a third of its ultimate pre market-listing target – following a new round of wholesale capital-raising.
Lance Wiggs, Punakaiki founder and manager, said the wholesale offer – due to close out this week – would come in somewhere “between $2-3 million” with investors stumping up a minimum of $100,000 each.
“This was a relatively sleepy capital-raising,” Wiggs said. “But we’re very happy with the calibre of investors who have come on board.”
Prior to the August wholesale offer, the Punakaiki fund, which registered as a retail product under Financial Market Conduct Act (FMC) regulations last September, reported just north of $28 million in assets under management.
According to the recently-published Punakaiki annual report, the fund grew by about $11 million since last September as a result of various capital-raisings and asset revaluations, which contributed about equally to the increase.
Launched in 2014, Punakaiki invests in early-stage NZ ventures with 19 companies currently on its books.
“We’ve got a few pending investments in some of our existing companies plus we have two or three new ones under consideration,” Wiggs said.
About 10 of the 19 firms reported annual revenue of $1 million or more, with four of those companies recording yearly income of about $10 million.
“The five or six very small companies only make up about 6 per cent of the overall portfolio,” he said.
Combined “annualised quarterly revenues” across the portfolio totaled roughly $80 million as at June this year, the Puankaiki report says.
Current Punakaiki investments include cloud-based point of sale software provider, Vend; online disease management firm, Melon Health; and agri-tech business, Hayload. The fund recently exited a holding in online login identity authenticator ThisData after it was bought out by the US OneLogin group.
Wiggs said Punakaiki received shares in OneLogin in the deal that should see it recoup the previously written-down ThisData investment.
The fund is targeting $100 million in funds under administration prior to a listing on the NZX, which the report says could happen “in the next 24 months”.
In the report, Wiggs also condemns reported “predatory and inappropriate behaviour to women by US venture capitalists, including by one person I previously worked with”.
“I am saddened to hear whispers that we are not perfect here in New Zealand either,” he says in the report. “We will not condone this sort of behaviour, and we will continue to fight to improve the way investors interact with founders in New Zealand.”
The Punakaiki board “will develop policy around diversity and inclusion that sits alongside our other governance policies” over the year, Wiggs says in the report,
As well as Wiggs the Punakaiki Fund board includes chair, Z Energy chief Mike Bennetts, Cyber Toa chief and former NZX chief operating officer, Mandy Simpson Bryan Hutchins, and Pathfinder Asset Management co-founder, John Berry.