Fitch Ventures

Sage is the evolution of a legacy built upon resilience, passion, integrity and curiosity - created in partnership with the Lauder Zinterhofer family. Sage is an evergreen investment platform that partners with high-integrity founders and fund managers across sectors, stages, and geographies. We invest through a human- and data-centric lens, evolving alongside the ever-changing markets around us. Our founders are an extension of our family, building businesses that shape and change our world.

Our mission is to mitigate the risks of investing in startups and make it more accessible to experienced and first-time investors alike; to give fledgling businesses with world-changing ideas the support they need to succeed and to truly capture the return potential of the UK startup market. What do we do? We’re a venture capital firm that uses data and diversification to maximise return potential. To do this we created the Access EIS fund: a uniquely data-driven approach to investing in startups that co-invests with the business angels we’ve identified as the top performing in the UK to gain access to the most promising investment opportunities. Access then builds a portfolio large enough to capture the annual growth in the UK startup market. Our data. We spent two years indexing and analysing the UK’s startup and scale-up market using data from Companies House and other sources. Our findings uncovered that the market as a whole consistently grows at around 28%, but that there are a subset of investors whose returns far exceed the market. You can read the full description of our data analysis and how it led to the creation of Access in our whitepaper.

BIP Ventures consistently produces exceptional outcomes for founders and top-quartile returns for investors. We partner with people who share our passion for solving real problems and unleashing the power of innovation to create incomparable value. OUR MISSION We identify and capture opportunities for the people we serve. We are drawn to big problems that impact society and to those who see vexing challenges as opportunities. These are people who dream up ideas and then embrace the real work required to bring them to life. We connect the people who invest in possibility. OUR FOCUS We invest in companies across various stages of growth. Each has the potential to become a category leader in an emerging, high-growth market. BIP Ventures focuses on big problems, big ideas, and the bold founders and innovators who are advancing innovation to solve them. Software and tech-enabled services solving real problems 1st institutional capital (Seed, Series A, Series B) Annual recurring revenue between $100K-$100M OUR APPROACH Different by design. Since 2007, we have continued to refine our value proposition and investment platform to create advantages for investors and founders that other VCs can’t replicate. INNOVATIVE PRODUCTS FOR INVESTORS: We design investment products that increase access to capital and reduce drag on returns, allowing us to do things other VCs can’t. AN ELITE TEAM OF ALIGNED INDIVIDUALS: We balance heart, know-how, and superior experience investing in and scaling category-leading companies. BEST-IN-CLASS DATA SCIENCE: We capture unique data drivers to give our team a distinct information advantage and foundation for guidance. FINANCIAL SCIENCE & REAL OPTION THEORY: Scientific rigor grounds our investment decisions, yielding process advantages and consistent outlier returns. HUMAN + MACHINE PARADIGM: We empower our partners with timely data, producing competitive advantages at the strategic and tactical levels. PERFORMANCE ENGINEERING PLATFORM™: Our Performance Engineering efforts strengthen portfolio company competitiveness and market leverage, resulting in an increased probability of positive outcomes. A PARTNERSHIP MINDSET: We actively seek out and provide economic and social benefits for our founders, investors, and team members. SYMMETRICAL & ETHICAL TRANSACTIONS: We are high-integrity partners who seek the win-win because we are in the business of building together.

We are constantly inspired by relentless founders tackling big problems globally. That's why we decided to professionalize our angel investing side hustle via 10K Ventures - investing our own capital, time, and network as fast and early as possible. Industry agnostic. Geographically opportunistic. Founder-centric. Invested alongside Tiger Global, a16z, Softbank, Alter Global, Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital, local VCs and angels, and more. Track Record so far: Invested in 20+ early-stage startups directly **** % IRR*= 67+% 1 Exit 🙌 *Vintage: Q1/2019. Estimates as of Q4/2022. Includes both realized and unrealized returns. Portfolio: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/10kv/recent_investments OUR (HYPO)THESIS*:#1: GOAL: 400X RETURN - We aim for $25k tickets to be $10MM outcomes. We have limited capital but ambitious targets, hence we are astute and disciplined in finding these deals. Each deal we make shall be backed by strong convictions that it could return >400x of our investment. #2: We value Quality and ROI as much as Entry VALUATION. We care about returns and probability of success as much as entry valuations. We acknowledge that serial entrepreneurs or repeat founders could demand a higher valuation in exchange for a “de-risked” premium on team and execution. But at the same time, sometimes the big winners are further driven by external forces. Either way, what we’re looking for is to find opportunities backed by a strong conviction of achieving massive total value creation potential… …which leads us to… #3: We like LARGE TAMs, with Low-PMF-High-Execution Risk type of verticals. We like LARGE TAMs as this indicates how big the revenue potential is going to be (=valuation in the long run). We don’t just mean large top-down hypothetical market sizes, we want to have strong convictions that there is a clear path to a certain scale and we do this through bottom-up calculations and clearly understand what needs to be true in order to reach that level of scale and impact. Our bare minimum is for us to see a clear path to at least $100M Annual Rev RR / ARR potential. Typically, these are category-defining or clear emerging category leaders in a particular geography. Usually identifying and finding solutions to what would be the largest problems in >10 years. You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.― Buckminster Fuller In addition, we also prefer gunning for a high probability of scaling with a low probability of failure - We need to have strong convictions that this works, but simultaneously notoriously difficult enough that only a few could pull it off. #4: For Low-PMF-High-Execution Risk type of verticals, the biggest de-risking element of the equation: The FOUNDERS. We believe that especially since we are focused on investing in Low-PMF-High-Execution risk verticals, ultimately, we hypothesize that it’s all about getting 💯 conviction on the founders. Here are some hypotheses on what we think resonated with us: We prefer problem space-centric and thesis-driven entrepreneurs. They have built strong convictions on the problem space they’re in (as opposed to the solution), which could indicatively mean they don’t give up easily if certain approaches/solutions don’t work. We prefer serial entrepreneurs. All things equal, we have a preference for founders who has experience in building great products and has experienced both wins and losses over their entrepreneurial journey. We prefer the ones who knows how to sell the vision to investors, talent, and partners; and drive and implement their vision to reality (Note: this doesn’t mean we rule out first time founders. Ultimately, what we like to see is strong track record of exceptional capabilities and/or network.) We prefer those with a strong narrative on founder-market fit. Ultimately, we want to back founders who seemingly are born for it. They immediately have the necessary knowledge, network, and most importantly the empathy and commitment to make their vision happen. And how do we attract founders? #5: On Attracting Founders and winning deals - RELEVANCE and REPUTATION are key. It’s hard to pick winning founders, but it's much harder to be picked by winning founders. The top founders and hottest deals are not only difficult to find and catch, they're also 100 times harder to get in and close. As angel investors, we always aim to be part of the cap table to show our commitment and earn the "badge of trust" from the founders. However, achieving this is often even more difficult. To earn our reputation and the trust of the founders, we must hustle our way to provide value-add. This way, we can stand out from the rest and end up being picked. So far, below are the things we think we could add value: NETWORK. We are constantly building from the ground up a strong network of investors, talent, and BD/partnerships in that we can provide strategic INTROS to founders. SIGNALLING. We strive to have a good reputation and maintain a strong track record of picking winners (vs spray-and-pray approach). NOTHING ELSE 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♂️. We try our best to be of value-add, but if there’s no need, we don’t push for it. We’re not superhumans who would know all answers to founders’ questions; we’re just superfans for these founders we’d go the extra mile for them when they’re in need of support.

Five seasoned entrepreneurs got together over a cup of coffee, driven by their shared vision of contributing to NEW INDIA's growth story. Their aspiration was to empower visionary entrepreneurs, harness their innovative potential, and foster the creation of enduring enterprises, drawing upon the reservoir of their own experiences. From this inspired gathering emerged the concept of initiating an early-stage growth fund, aimed at nurturing the ambitions of businesses and teams daring to envision grandeur. This consortium of entrepreneurs then joined forces with a cadre of esteemed investment professionals, distinguished as blue-chip luminaries in their field. Together, they embarked on the journey to craft a prominent investment platform, one that would serve as the crucible for entrepreneurial dreams to be forged into reality. Their collective dream? To propel India into the echelons of the “Innovation Capital of the World.”