What is an anchor investor? In stock market listings (Initial Public Offerings or IPOs) the company raising funds often meets bigger investors before publishing their share offerings or deciding the terms or valuation. The lead investors include institutional investors, mutual funds, family offices, high net worth individuals and other professional investors. In specialised sectors, they include sector specialists. Since the digital finance ecosystem is still very young, our kind of digital lead investors have not emerged until now.

In addition to the lead investor role in a financing round, we can make soft or hard commitments to invest more in the next rounds if the company meets pre-agreed milestones. If the company develops their business well and the corporate governance is remains good we can play the lead investor role again in all the financing rounds until the IPO. This long-term commitment makes us more than a lead investor in a particular round, into an anchor investor on the company's growth path until exit or public listing.

Taikina offers multiple benefits for its shareholders:

1. Liquidity. We aim to make our own share liquid as soon as possible. Unlisted growth companies often take a long time to develop and create value. This will be the case with most of our investment targets too and by investing in them directly, an investor will need to wait for a long time for exit or stock market listing. Our aim is to offer possibility to materialise value increase by listing our own share in public market place. Our investment strategy will not be purely exit-focused - if justified by fundamentals we are happy to continue owning a profitable and dividend-paying company. Our evergreen structure (i.e. no pre-determined lifetime or end-date) makes this kind of long-term creed possible. We won't need to exit promising companies for our internal reasons before the full value is realised. But we aim to enable our investors to realise the value increase by making our own share liquid.
2. Diversification and stock selection. As a bigger and more professional investor, we are able to follow the deal flow more widely than a single shareholder can and compare a prospective deal to peers on a wider scale. This will enable us to diversify the risk over bigger number of cases and to avoid cases where valuation, company quality or other terms are out of line with peers. We also can gain access to deals where larger minimum ticket size or swift action is required, hence investing in cases that would be inaccessible to smaller investors acting alone. Separately, we can occasionally offer bridge financing for companies that are not yet ready for the platforms or distributed shareholder base and need help from us.
3. Valuations. Bigger ticket size will improve the bargaining position in valuation discussions, including later follow-on financing rounds if the company raises more capital. Over time, we expect to build a reputation as a reliable anchor investor and hence gain leverage to negotiate crowdfunding discounts, comparable to IPO-discounts in public stock market listings.
4. Better follow-up and control. Having a larger stake in the company and being able to participate in the future rounds, we will have a bigger influence on the target company governance than multiple small shareholders alone would. We believe the best corporate governance is reached when company has both big and smaller investors in the cap table.
5. Cost synergies. In many platforms the investor fee depends on the size of the ticket (smaller percentage for big investments) and the fixed costs of becoming an investor are common, particularly in Peer-to-Peer platforms. In many equity platforms there are typical €100k or €200k minimum ticket sizes before the investor can invest directly in the target. Smaller investments are directed via an Special Purpose Vehicle (“SPV”), a separate holding company for one investment target only. Administration of the SPVs is costly even in case of failed investments. In successful exits they often cut the profits without ability to offset losses elsewhere against the capital gain. While running Taikina will cost some money too, we believe our costs are very competitive compared to SPV and fund fees. Additionally our success costs are based on profits on the portfolio level instead of separate cases.