Kilde Pitch at Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology (SWITCH)

Radek Jezbera, CEO and Co-Founder presents Kilde at SWITCH pitch day

Our long-term partners and supporters Enterprise Singapore (ESG) invited us to pitch Kilde to the VC firms, banks and investors within Singapore-MENA pitch day. The event, organized by ESG with the aim to enhance collaborations and discussions between Singapore and MENA ecosystems,  took place on November 11th, during the Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology (SWITCH).

The most prominent Singapore startups interested to enter MENA (Middle East and North Africa) and looking to raise funds from the MENA Region had the opportunity to pitch to more than 100 representatives from the MENA VCs and banks and present their solution to them.

Startups across different sectors, including Fintech, Agritech, Healthtech, Edutech and Logistics were featured.  

At Kilde, we see MENA as prominent market for the future growth. We have been recently granted a Tech Startup license at Abu Dhabi Global Markets (ADGM), and are looking to begin our operations out of Hub71 in Abu Dhabi soon. This event was a great opportunity to get Kilde onto radars of the potential investors and clients from the region, and initiate valuable dialogues.

Watch Radek killing it with his comprehensive presentation in the video below. Enjoy!

Transcript of the Pitch

What do we do at Kilde and why

Hi, I'm Radek, co-founder and CEO of Kilde. Kilde is a Singaporean startup. We operate a two-sided platform where institutions and individuals can discover and buy alternative assets. Our mission is to open alternative investments to regular investors.

For that, we have a capital market license in Singapore and a Tech Startup license in Abu Dhabi. We operate from both of these offices, and our shareholders are Purple Ventures and Dubai FinTech ventures. Through Dubai FinTech ventures, we are fortunate to have prominent Middle Eastern investors like Visa, Dubai International Financial Center, and Mashreq Bank.  

What do we do? We discover new alternative investments through data science. By doing that we bridge the information gap between the sellers and the buyers, and eliminate the middlemen who charge commission in between. So what's the problem? The alternative assets are a very interesting proposition, especially nowadays, it's a driver of growth of the portfolio, it is protection against inflation, it is a hedge against the crash in public markets, but there are a lot of problems. It's still very much an insider's game, where opaque asset valuation reign elitist group of experts form opinions, and investors cannot enter this asset class because of the high minimal entry investments. We breach this information and access gap through our platform.

Our Product

We offer a range of asset classes with an emphasis on data-intensive and income-generating assets, like for us and consumer portfolios or SME assets.  And we do it through operating a two-sided platform, which you can imagine the sort of Amazon, in the investments on the one hand you have deal providers, who are the seller on the platform. And on the other hand, you have investors who are the buyers, and the inventory of the platform is the tokenized securitized financial instruments, which are exchanged between the parties. It is a platform, that's why it has a platform network effect, where the more investors we have the more deals we're going to have, the more deals they're going to have the more investors we have.

So excuse me. So the way how we do it is by capturing the whole value chain, from the deal origination to servicing. So first we discover the alternative assets through data science. We securitized tokenize it and make it investable, distribute it to investors, and then monitor and service the assets until it is repaid or liquidated.

Value proposition

The value proposition for investors is very clear, they will get a high risk-adjusted return, but also to the provider they eventually get the liquidity for otherwise illiquid assets which by itself, hikes the value in the price of the asset by 10 to 20%. Now is a great time to do business like this, because debt yields are on record lows. COVID has shifted the customer behaviour online and securitization tokenisation is regulated and generally alternative assets are booming, especially among institutional investors.

Traction

The traction so far was very good. We have issued $6 million of alternative assets in securities since our launch in February earlier this year. Currently, we have $3.5 million of deals available. And we have $44 million or so-called deal flow waiting to be securitized and sold to the investors. We have entered into partnerships with the major consumer finance players here in Southeast Asia like Atome, Home Credit, Robocash, which provide consumer assets to our investors.

Roadmap

Private debt investments into consumer lending assets are the first stepping stone into scaling the whole platform. Eventually, we would like to become a multi-asset platform for alternatives, like a supermarket for alternatives in Southeast Asia. There are very nice examples outside the region of successful companies doing this. Most notably on the top of the slides is the Yieldstreet, which is a near unicorn based on the Series C they did earlier in June 2021. Or closer to us in India is the Credavenue, which raised very recently the largest series A in the region, $90 million with a valuation $420 million. Creating a platform like this definitely has a lot of value.

Our roadmap so far was that we have a minimum viable product. We have a regulatory license, and we have first paying customers on both sides. The traction has been very good. We have recently opened the office and the ADGM. Everybody in our team has more than 10 years of experience in consumer lending, SME lending or transaction management. We worked in companies like PwC, Accenture, IBM, and Microsoft. That's all from me today. Thank you very much for your attention and a big thank you to Enterprise Singapore for organizing.