It is hard to know quite how to describe Apeira Capital Advisors, an investment firm that was launched in early 2020 and has just taken its first position, investing in a $200 million Series E funding round for San Francisco foodtech company GrubMarket.
Moves such as that make Apeira look like a classic venture capital fund, but by also designing bespoke derivative technology to short to short private companies that it thinks are overvalued, it looks more like a hedge fund. The way founder and managing partner Natalie Hwang tells it, it sounds like both.
“We are taking a long/short approach to investing in private tech companies to create more liquid investments and drive deliberate outcomes,” she says. “The strategy is predominately long-only with the ability to hedge out tail risk to offer a risk-managed approach to venture investing.”
We believe in a world of better odds
Most of Apeira’s investments will be in Series A to C stages of fundraising, although they can be later, as the GrubMarket deal shows. But the most intriguing aspect of Apeira’s approach lies elsewhere, in what it calls its “tactical operations” book, where Hwang has developed a synthetic way to short private-company valuations that she hopes will improve the current odds of success for those investing in the private markets.
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