New Investments

This edition profiles two recently awarded investment mandates that reinforce our strong conviction for active investment management and focus on innovation and emerging technologies.

ACORN CAPITAL EMERGING GROWTH STRATEGY

Acorn Capital was established in 1998 and pioneered microcap and emerging companies investing in Australia. Microcaps are stocks ranked between 350 and 600 in order of ASX market capitalisation. Acorn is the country’s longest running microcap fund manager with the largest team of emerging company specialists.

Its investment process seeks evidence of sustainable competitive advantage addressing large markets  with strong growth prospects, underpinned with genuine innovation. 

The Emerging Growth Strategy seeks particularly to identify mis-priced securities while focussing on attributes including underlying value, industry diversification, stock numbers and stage of development.

Sectors currently within the Acorn investment  universe include: cloud computing migration; advanced manufacturing; remote working and collaboration; learning; eCommerce; climate technology; fintech;  and communications.

ARTESIAN FEMALE LEADERS VENTURE CAPITAL FUND

Launched in partnership with Scale Investors, the Artesian Female Leaders Venture Capital Fund recognises that while talent is evenly distributed across male and female founders (as well as investors, employees and board members), a material inequality exists between the opportunities available for male and female founders in the start-up operating environment.

Taking account of this current imbalance which causes an unequal distribution of capital available for female-led start-up enterprises, Artesian identifies under-invested female talent and unexplored business opportunities in Australia, New Zealand and the broader Asia Pacific region.

An example of a type of investment Artesian plans to make is in Singaporean-based Turtle Tree, which is making human-free breast milk in a lab. Artesian already manages investments across  

public and private debt as well as venture capital. The company has exposures to sectors including agri-food, climate and clean energy, artificial intelligence, robotics, medical and health.