UNSW launches startup investment platform Barker Street Ventures
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The news: UNSW has launched Barker Street Ventures, a new digital platform to help facilitate investments from invited high net-worth and sophisticated investors in deep tech startups incubated by the university.
The context: The digital investment platform will be run by financial services provider GXE while under the guidance of UNSW’s New Ventures team.
The platform will feature early stage companies at pre-seed, seed, series A and series B stages. It has launched initially with three startups that are undertaking capital raises. The companies are a quantum computing, life sciences and an IVF startup, although the names have not been disclosed publicly.
Businesses featured on the investment platform must already have a lead investor for a capital raise and UNSW has to be a current or planned shareholder through the raise.
Prospective investors on the platform must be able to invest on the same terms as the university and the lead investor.
UNSW New Ventures head Maria Halasz told Capital Brief that the university leads Australia in the number of spinouts it produces, coming it at 19 new companies last year, with Barker Street Ventures intended to help fill funding gaps.
Halasz noted that Barker Street will initially be “inviting investors selectively to the platform”. The original concept for the platform was to facilitate connection with UNSW roughly 250,000 alumni, but now also extends to “friends of UNSW”.
Prospective investors can register for Barker Street Ventures here. Eligible companies can register here.
What they said: “Deep tech takes a long time to develop, a long time to commercialise, with a lot of money and has multiple funding gaps. What we're hoping is that we actually facilitate solving that problem to some extent,” Halasz said.
She also noted that the UNSW New Ventures team is “not aware of any other university that connects their alumni with the spin out companies this way through a licensed investment platform. So we do believe that we are leading the way on that”.
The source: Barker Street Ventures website
