The iSelect Approach for Accredited Investors

There is a disconnect in the startup funding ecosystem. You want to diversify your investments but do not have the opportunity to choose. Most ordinary Americans only learn about new venture opportunities when they have an IPO. Years after the company started. Without the option to invest earlier.

Investing in venture capital is hard. It takes time and expertise to adequately source, identify, and monitor a portfolio of venture investments. Diversifying across several deals typically requires $1.0 million or more of investable capital. Monitoring venture investments requires constant vigilance. The task is unmanageable for most people despite the potential returns.

iSelect solves this problem by managing the diligence burden for investors, providing diversification by allowing a smaller investment in many early-stage companies. Providing you the choice to decide on your terms.

A Portfolio of Venture Investments

iSelect is one of the first investment vehicles that affords accredited investors access to an evergreen portfolio of venture investment opportunities. Each thoroughly vetted by a committee of successful entrepreneurs, domain experts, and professional venture investors. iSelect manages the sourcing, diligence, and ongoing efforts with the investments. Accredited investors in our fund choose from several investment strategies that meet their expectations. Creating a portfolio of opportunities is a common strategy used with large investors. With iSelect, accredited investors can get the same form of diversification at a price point suitable for their needs.

Due Diligence

Each company in the iSelect portfolio is subjected to an extensive due diligence regime. This takes the hard work of vetting potential investments off of fund investors. Once selected for review by our Venture Team, likely companies are studied by an industry-specific Selection Committee composed of independent entrepreneurs, business executives, world-renowned scientists and researchers, and accomplished venture investors in market niches including Healthcare, Agriculture, and Technology before being submitted to iSelect’s Investment Committee for final review.

Strict Selection Criteria

As part of the diligence process, iSelect’s Selection Committees dig into the fundamentals underlying each company:

Is the venture commercially ready for business?
Does the venture have the ability to create entry barriers necessary for a sustainable competitive advantage?
Is the management team capable of growing the business responsibly?
Has the company taken the appropriate steps to identify and address the risks of the venture to the extent possible for the relevant stage of the company?

Companies that fall short of these criteria are not accepted to the iSelect platform.

Informed Decisions

Our investors also have access, subject to non-disclosure requirements, to all of this research in the form of a summarized and packaged diligence file made available to investors and their financial advisors for each venture investment in the iSelect portfolio. Post-investment, companies provide regular reports so that investors can monitor the progress of their portfolio, all to help accredited investors more easily evaluate, understand, and manage their personalized series of early-stage venture securities.

How to Invest

iSelect works with investors and/or their financial advisors to help create a diversified portfolio of venture investments. This is one of many investment strategies for growth, retirement, and wealth preservation. Each individual’s situation, though, is different. By identifying and investing in only the most promising early-stage companies, investors support the work of intelligent, innovative entrepreneurs and may reap the potential reward of investment returns over time.

Must be an accredited investor comfortable with a hold period that can be as long as seven years or more.
The typical minimum investment in iSelect is $50k, no less than $5k per company.
iSelect investments can be held in a retirement account, a regular brokerage account, or a trust. The Fund is structured for investment by individual investors, family offices, retirement plans, and institutional investors.

Consideration

With 2021 well underway and with public markets still strong, we think it is an important time to highlight some of the key private market, venture investment themes that iSelect fund has identified for the year. We believe technologies transforming the Agriculture, Food and Wellness markets will flourish, with a focus on four areas: technologies that enable better food choices to drive better health outcomes, technologies that drive better, more profitable farm operations, technologies that drive the Consumerization of Healthcare, and biome-based treatment technologies. At iSelect, we invest for impact AND performance. We offer qualified investors access to emerging growth companies through our national venture capital strategy. Our unique structure allows our investors to continue to invest in these companies as they develop.

Timing

Why is now the right time for venture? The answer is that now is not explicitly the right time. Venture is something we need in our economy at all times. Now is not better than any other particular time. The question is, why ever stop? When we look at the challenges we’re facing in food and healthcare the reality is there is someone, somewhere who has an insight about how to build a product that will solve those problems. And if they put the right resources to it, they will succeed. As long as we need new technology to make life better or make our lives more enjoyable, we need venture capital to help fuel those entrepreneurs.

What is iSelect as a product?

iSelect is a very unique product, but when you break it into its parts it’s fairly easy to understand. On the front end we’re a traditional venture capital fund. We have a diligence process. We have an investment process. We have categories of industries where we have focus and real expertise, and we invest in companies in those areas that meet requirements for the fund. On the back end we’re unique in that we don’t raise a large amount of capital at one time and deploy it over the life of our fund. Each deal that we bring onto the fund, our investors have to prove and determine to invest in that deal. We have to constantly prove our diligence standards. It’s accessible, transparent and easy for investors to come in and see our comprehensive process.

What is the ideal iSelect company?

We are looking for founders that are passionate and we want the problem they’re trying to solve to be big, real, and painful. We want the solution to be revolutionary and we want our capital to be able to help them solve that problem. We want to know that they have customers involved and that the solution they’ve come up with actually meets those customers’ and market needs. And we want the team to be capital efficient with the money they’re spending.

What does the ideal iSelect company look like?

We’re looking for a company that has an opportunity to have a 10x return to our investment or greater in a period of three to seven years. What excites us at iSelect are companies that are solving big problems. We want companies that are going to be the Monsantos of the future. Not just in the size and the scope, but the impact they have on people’s lives. We want to create positive impacts on people’s lives, so we invest in areas like agricultural production and areas like producing healthy foods for our kids. They are problems that impact real people’s lives on a daily basis. That’s what we’re trying to do at iSelect. We’re trying to solve the big problems out there. Find ways to bring capital to the entrepreneurs who are the real heroes out there getting up every morning, beating away at these things that are problems that you and me and everyone else faces in their everyday lives.

What is iSelect?

iSelect is a venture capital firm. What that means is we look at hundreds and hundreds of different companies and we apply tough diligence standards to each of them, looking at whether the team has a good plan for growing the business, whether the team is qualified and credible, and more. We do that to resolve the few who provide the best opportunities for investors. And then iSelect takes that smaller set of investments and goes to investors who are interested in venture capital and provides a way for them to invest in these companies, either individually or all at once. We co-invest alongside other venture capitalists. We source transactions through to an exit where the company would become public or get bought. And we manage that whole investment process on behalf of our investors.