1897 – Democratizing Private Markets with Mila Khrapchenko

Josh (00:00:04) - Hey there, thoughtful listener. Would you like consistent and predictable sales activity with no spam and no ads? I'll teach you step by step how to do this, particularly if you're an agency owner, consultant, coach, or B2B service provider. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create more than $10 million in revenue. Just head to up my influence. Com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to up my influence. Com and click on podcast. We'd love to have you. With us right now it's Mila Khrapchenko. Mila, you are the co-founder and co-CEO of Ameetee. Now, Ameetee is found on the web at a meeting. Oh, that's Ameetee. Mila, thank you so much for joining us.

Mila (00:01:18) - Hi, Josh, and thank you for having me here.

Josh (00:01:21) - Absolutely. It's great to have you. We'll share just a bit about what Ameetee is and what you do.

Mila (00:01:27) - Ameetee is a marketplace. And the very special one, or I would say are what we do is we work with or with institutional market players such as brokers or wealth managers, banks or family offices. We do not work with our individual investors, and what we do is we effectively create a bridge between the private market investments and the clients of those financial institutions. We aim to partner with them or offer them a ready to sell product in the private equity or private debt space, or sometimes in the space of venture capital funds or VC opportunities. And that's basically it.

Josh (00:02:11) - So this would be, again, kind of a directory for both investors and startups that are looking for startup capital. Is that or am I getting that right?

Mila (00:02:21) - Yes. That's correct. On the one side, Ameetee invites all those who are looking for private equity assets or private assets for their clients. On the other hand, we encourage funds are startups and private equity companies.

Mila (00:02:39) - to to come to our platform and, to raise capital there. or equally investors who are, who have invested probably early in the game in some startup and are willing to, find an exit for their investment.

Josh (00:02:57) - You know, just to give an idea of some companies that you've got listed, you've got one that's current on a series E. I'm also seeing a particular company that I know, telegram, you've got listed. So would you mind sharing just a bit about, you know, what types of companies or startups are participating?

Mila (00:03:16) - Yeah, it was pleasure. Josh, our first of all, we are looking generally at companies from round B and onwards. series E and there and before will be too early, for the financial institutions which with which we work. But generally we will look for the companies we would personally invest in, the companies that have been vetted by our investment team. We are ourselves, meaning the founders of MIT, investment bankers we know. And we're also investors in their in early stage year and growth stage startups.

Mila (00:03:55) - So we know how to do due diligence. And we prove that the investment opportunities ourselves. So it can be actually, different industries, it can be different regions, it can be different kind of fundraising activities. Telegram, for example, they have outstanding, a bond which is a pre-IPO convertible. Or there was another company, relatively small one, but very promising in our view, by that, which is our HR tech startup in the United Arab Emirates. Or another example could be Alto Pharmacy, a US based there, late stage VC backed company that may go public at some point or probably even soon.

Josh (00:04:41) - Yeah. Excellent, excellent. Mila, what is it that Ameetee provides the marketplace or provides kind of the investor and, you know, later stage startup community that may have not existed previously.

Mila (00:04:57) - Oh, that's probably thank you for for asking me. Josh, this is one of my favorite or favorite topics. What Ameetee does provide to financial institutions is the ready product, which is very well understood by them.

Mila (00:05:14) - in our view, all of the the investment opportunities they are, they come in a security form, which means that almost every back office will know how to process, this transaction, which is a very essential thing. Another thing is that Ameetee provides their investor materials, and they're not just that, but they're, you know, full data rooms on each and every opportunity, which are not easily available frequently under well known top names. We do not, showcase any investment opportunity without a deep dive ourselves and deep dive in, we create a data room which allows the financial institution either to rely on what we see or to run additional due diligence. This is the broad picture of what we deliver to our clients on the on the buy side, on the investment side. And there are to the companies that are looking to raise funds, we we deliver another another channel to do so because they're like, imagine if you're a client of a large bank, for example, if you have a private banking account yourself, what kind of services will you be offered? You will probably offer it a typical or, you know, typical range like brokerage services where you will be able to invest, maybe some investment management, maybe deposits, and very rarely alternative investments.

Mila (00:06:48) - There are so many, underbanked clients which do not sometimes even know that they are willing to have this, alternative asset allocation in their portfolios.

Josh (00:06:59) - Yeah. And certainly there's got to be some pretty good advantages for the investment community that participates with the meeting. Can you share a little bit more about their experience?

Mila (00:07:10) - Yeah. Of course. Look, among the investment community, there were funds which can, for example, syndicate deals in which they participate through committee. They can trim off the investments, for example, the fund is expiring and there. But the liquidity event in certain company is, let's say, far away. Still, they can go to the secondary market and their Ameetee will be one of the secondary market opportunities for them because it reaches out to a relatively new investment audience to the client. So for banks, wealth managers and so on, not necessarily large banks. Large banks sometimes will have private equity offering in their product lines, but not every. If your relatively medium sized bank or, you know, small broker, you still might be interested to, to offer this kind of instrument.

Mila (00:08:09) - But there you will not be able it's it just takes a lot of time. And there, you know, a really good, strong team that could run this kind of business, that could source the the good deals, that could proofread them and so on. So they are definitely benefiting that we are we have come into play.

Josh (00:08:30) - Mia, what would you say? I mean here we are recording this and it's you know, nearly April 2024. What can you say about the current landscape of the investment community? Or, you know, again, if you're a early or late stage startup, likely what they may be encountering this year. And if you have a bit of a crystal ball, I'd love your, you know, either predictions or thoughts about the future and certainly kind of compare that versus the, the past. Basically, where are we at on trends?

Mila (00:09:05) - Okay, so crystal ball. Here it is. I would say that if we look back, probably 20, 22 was there was a very tough year for the startups and for VC industry as a whole.

Mila (00:09:23) - It was a tough year for everyone. Almost all the brokerage accounts were turning red. Whether you invested in bonds or stocks or private equity. So first of all, we've seen there a really sharp downturn in the market. Not for every startup. Always. There are some startups, like for example, OpenAI, they really boomed, or some other startups that are related to artificial intelligence. They are booming. But generally the industry was feeling not so good on the side of the startups. the funds were sitting on or on certain large amounts of dry powder. I mean, venture capital funds. But they were very hesitant to invest them because suddenly turned out the public market valuations. They collapsed. If the companies were not making money, it became increasingly important. So for the startups that didn't fundraise in advance to 2022, 2023, the times were really tough. I think that situation is gradually turning better. We've seen real or, you know, strong recovery in the public equity markets, whether we look at Europe, whether we look at the United States, S&P and Nasdaq and Dow Jones are either close or at all time highs.

Mila (00:10:50) - and there the situation generally is looking better. the VC industry typically lags behind the public markets by a period between nine months and 18 months. So if nothing bad happens, there definitely will be recovery. And they're talking about, specific industries. AI related will be very popular. Different startups related to creating their, large language models, not just OpenAI. definitely, chip production like Nvidia gaining 15% in just one day and they're becoming top three is or is a good example. And there are startups in this sphere too. I still believe that fintech will be very popular because the penetration of it has been quite low, and e-commerce probably were increasingly skewed towards buying more and more in internet. So it will continue.

Josh (00:11:49) - Yeah. Yeah. You bring up a good point. I would imagine most any investor is going to ask, you as a startup, how are you going to keep how are you either going to adapt with AI or how could I potentially eat your lunch?

Speaker 4 (00:12:06) - oh.

Josh (00:12:06) - There's there's no sense, right, in going to market.

Josh (00:12:09) - And then like, all of a sudden, you know, next week ChatGPT comes out with something that just, like, makes you irrelevant, which we're seeing a lot of disruption in that regard.

Mila (00:12:18) - Absolutely. Josh. Look, we have identified quite a number of areas where to use AI, and we are gradually implementing that, first of all, AI in their investment sphere where you produce a lot of content and you will probably understand me here. it's very helpful because there are you don't need to write manually all the stuff. You can delegate a very good deal creating summaries or, you know, creating slightly different or nuance content, based on one base. And there are many other things. This is a very utilitarian approach. But on the other hand, we do have a plan. And this is this is just a plan. We are just creating a technical task for that. But as our bankers, we absolutely believe that there, you know, depending on the instrument and their industry, they should be scoring systems available, which at least there will allow us to filter the products based whether you know, it should be considering or not.

Mila (00:13:29) - Currently what we're doing, we are doing everything manually with our investment team. But there, you know, as I mentioned, we were creating a technical task to allow us to, to build models over our own and to filter the projects we are looking at and maybe reviewing 5 or 10 times less projects manually and do the bulk with AI. So here are just a couple of examples how we could or could implement it.

Josh (00:14:01) - The website a meeting. Oh, that's Ameetee CIO and Mila. When someone goes to a meeting I o what would you recommend they do?

Mila (00:14:13) - I would recommend that they go to the platform. There is a link on the website to the platform, get registered and as soon as they registered they will see the the live deals that are on offer right now or they will see some content there. We regularly publish different articles. People can also visit there. We do have a LinkedIn page and I personally have it. We regularly post something that is exciting and interesting in our view and reflects what's going on in the market, and this is how people could or could reach out to us.

Josh (00:14:52) - Excellent. Again a meeting. Oh, Ludmila Kravchenko again. You are the co-founder and co-CEO. Ludmilla, thank you so much for joining us.

Mila (00:15:02) - Thank you. Josh, thank you for having me.

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