1897 – Democratizing Private Markets with Mila Khrapchenko

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0:58with us right now it's mila kravchenko mila you are the co-founder and co-ceo of amiti now amiti is found on the web at amiti.io that's a-m-e-e-t-e-e.io mila thank you so much for joining us Hi, Josh, and thank you for having me here. Absolutely. It's great to have you. We'll share just a bit about what Amiti is and what you do. Amiti is a marketplace and a very special one, I would say. What we do is we work with institutional market players, such as brokers, wealth managers, banks, or family offices. We do not work with our individual investors. And what we do is we effectively create a bridge between the private market investments and the clients of those financial institutions.

1:55We aim to partner with them, offer them a ready-to-sell product in the private equity or private debt space, or sometimes in the space of venture capital funds or VC opportunities. And that's basically it. So this would be, again, kind of a directory for both investors and startups that are looking for startup capital? Is that or am I getting that right? Yes, that's correct. On the one side, Amity invites all those who are looking for private equity assets or private debt assets for their clients. On another hand, we encourage funds, startups, and private equity companies to come to our platform and to raise capital there.

2:45Or equally, investors who have invested probably early in the game in some startup and are willing to find an exit for their investment. You know, just to give an idea of some companies that you've got listed, you've got one that's current on a Series E. I'm also seeing a particular company that I know, Telegram, you've got listed. So would you mind sharing just a bit about, you know, what types of companies or startups are participating? Yeah, with pleasure, Josh. First of all, we are looking generally at companies from round B and onwards. series e and there and before will be too early for the financial institutions which was which we work but generally we will look for the companies we would personally invest in the companies that have been vetted by our investment team where ourselves are meaning the founders of amity investment bankers we know how and we're also investors in our in early stage and growth stage startups so we know how to do due diligence and there we prove that the investment opportunities ourselves so it can be actually uh different industries it can be different regions it can be different kind of fundraising activities telegram for example they have outstanding um a bond which a pre-ipo convertible or there there was another company relatively small one but very promising in our view by zat which is our hr tech startup in the united amerites or another example could be alto pharmacy um a us-based their late stage vc backed company that may go public at some point probably even soon.

4:41Yeah, excellent. Excellent. Mila, what is it that Amiti provides the marketplace or provides kind of the investor and later stage startup community that may have not existed previously? Oh, that's probably, thank you for asking me, Josh. This is one of my favorite their favorite topics what amiti does provide to financial institutions is the ready product which is very well understood by them in our view all of the investment opportunities they are they come in a security form which means that almost every back office will know how to process this transaction, which is a very essential thing. Another thing is that Amiti provides their investor materials.

5:35And they're not just that, but they're, you know, full data rooms on each and every opportunity, which are not easily available, frequently on their well-known top names. We do not showcase any investment opportunity without a deep dive ourselves. and deep diving we created at a room which allows our financial institution either to rely on what we see or to run additional due diligence this is the broad picture of what we deliver to our clients on our on the buy side on the investment side and there to the companies that are looking to raise funds we we deliver another another channel to do so because they're like imagine if you're a client of a large bank for example if you have a private banking account yourself what kind of services will you be offered you will probably offer it a typical or you know typical range like brokerage services where you will be able to invest maybe some investment management, maybe deposits, and very rarely alternative investments.

6:48There are so many underbanked clients, which do not sometimes even know that they're willing to have this alternative asset allocation in their portfolios. Yeah. And certainly there's got to be some pretty good advantages for the investment community that participates with Amiti. Can you share a little bit more about their experience yeah of course look among the investment community there are funds which can for example syndicate deals in which they participate through amity they can trim off the investments for example the fund is expiring and there but the liquidity event in certain company is or let's say far away still they can go to the secondary market and their Amity will be one of the secondary market opportunities for them because it reaches out to a relatively new investment audience, to the clients or for banks, wealth managers and so on.

7:50Not necessarily large banks. Large banks sometimes will have private equity offering in their product lines, but not every. If you're a relatively medium-sized bank or a small broker, you still might be interested to offer this kind of instrument. but there you will not be able it's it just takes a lot of time and there you know a really good strong team that could run this kind of business that could source the the good deals that could proffered them and so on so they are definitely benefiting that we are we have come into play mila what would you say i mean here we are recording this and it's uh you know nearly April 2024, what can you say about the current landscape of the investment community?

8:43Or, you know, again, if you're a earlier or late stage startup, likely what they may be encountering this year. And if you have a bit of a crystal ball, I'd love your, you know, either predictions or thoughts about the future and certainly kind of compare that versus the past. Basically, where are we at on trends? Okay, so crystal ball, here it is. I would say that if we look back, probably 2022 was a very tough year for the startups and for VC industry as a whole. It was a tough year for everyone. Almost all the brokerage accounts were turning red, whether you invested bonds or stocks or private equity?

9:33So first of all, we've seen there a really sharp downturn in the market. Not for every startup, always there were some startups like, for example, OpenAI, they really boomed. Or some other startups that are related to artificial intelligence, they are booming. But generally, the industry was feeling not so good on the side of the startups. uh the funds were sitting on their on certain large amount of dry powder i mean venture capital funds but they were very hesitant to invest them because suddenly it turned out the public market valuations they collapsed if the companies were not making money it became increasingly important So for the startups that didn't fundraise in advance to 2022-2023, the times were really tough.

10:29I think that situation is gradually turning better. We've seen real strong recovery in the public equity markets, whether we look at Europe, whether we look at the United States. S &P and Nasdaq and Dow Jones are either close or at all-time highs. And the situation generally is looking better. The VC industry typically lags behind the public markets by a period between nine months and 18 months. So if nothing bad happens, there definitely will be recovery. and they're talking about specific industries ai related will be very popular different startups related to creating their large language models not just open ai definitely our cheap production like nvidia gaining 15 in just one day and they're becoming top three is there is a good example and startups in this sphere too.

11:36I still believe that fintech will be very popular because the penetration of it has been quite low and e-commerce probably were increasingly skewed towards buying more and more on internet. So it will continue. Yeah. Yeah. You bring up a good point. I would imagine most any investor is going to ask you as a startup, how are you going to adapt with AI or how could AI potentially eat your lunch? Because there's no sense, right, in going to market. And then like all of a sudden, you know, next week, ChatGPT comes out with something that just like makes you irrelevant, which we're seeing a lot of disruption in that regard.

12:19Absolutely, Josh. Look, we have identified there are quite a number of areas where to use AI and we're gradually implementing that. First of all, AI in investment sphere where you produce a lot of content, and you will probably understand me here, is very helpful. Because you don't need to write manually all the stuff. You can delegate a very good deal, creating summaries or creating slightly different or nuanced content based on one base. And there are many other things. this is a very utilitarian approach but there on another hand we do have a plan and this is this is just a plan we are just they're creating a technical task for that but as their ex-bankers we absolutely believe that they're you know depending on the instrument and their industry they should be scoring systems available which at least there will allow us to filter the products based whether you know it should be considering or not currently what we're doing we're doing everything manually with our investment team but there you know as i mentioned we were creating a technical task to allow us to or to build models over our own and to filter the projects we're looking at and maybe reviewing five or ten times less projects manually and do the bulk with AI.

13:55So here are just a couple of examples how we could implement it. The website amete.io, that's A-M-E-E-T-E-E dot I-O. And Mila, when someone goes to amete.io, what would you recommend they do? I would recommend that they go to the platform. There is a link on the website to the platform. Get registered. And as soon as they're registered, they will see the live deals that are on offer right now. Or they will see some content. We regularly publish different articles. People can also visit. We do have a LinkedIn page and I personally have it. we regularly post something that is exciting and interesting in our view and reflects what's going on in the market.

14:47And this is how people could or could reach out to us. Excellent. Again, amiti.io, Lyudmila Kravchenko, again, you are the co-founder and co-CEO. Lyudmila, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Josh. Thank you for having me.

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