New York State Comptroller to Promote Investments in Silicon Alley

August 21, 2013 Leave a comment

AUGUST 20, 2013, 10:17 AM

New York State Comptroller to Promote Investments in Silicon Alley

By MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED

As New York City continues to promote the rise of Silicon Alley start-ups, the state comptroller’s office is doing its part for the cause. On Tuesday, the office of Thomas P. DiNapoli plans to promote its investments in two technology companies, RebelMouse and CoopKanics, as part of its initiative to invest in New York businesses. (The two transactions were previously disclosed by the companies themselves.) The investments were made as part of the comptroller’s In-State Private Equity Program, which meant to support native New York businesses while also generating hopefully solid returns. Last year, the comptroller’s office boasted that the program over all had yielded an internal rate of return exceeding 30 percent.Though the program was created in 1999, Mr. DiNapoli has focused its efforts in recent years on homegrown tech companies, dovetailing with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg‘s “Made in N.Y.” initiative. It currently has about $278 million invested in New York City start-ups, and since 2011 has set aside an additional $60 million for early-stage investments.

Both deals mentioned in Tuesday’s announcement were made on behalf of the fund by SoftBank Capital, one of the investment firms managing state money as part of the comptroller’s program.

SoftBank led the $10.25 million Series A investment in RebelMouse, gaining a seat on the social networking aggregator’s board. It also participated in the roughly $3 million Series A round for CoopKanics, which hasn’t disclosed much about its plans other than it is focused on mobile.

Both companies have connections to previous investments made through the comptroller’s program. RebelMouse’s chief executive, Paul Berry, formerly worked at the Huffington Post. Another investor in the company, Michael Lazerow, founded the social media specialist advertising Buddy Media, which Salesforce.com bought last year for $689 million.

And the founders of CoopKanics, Jordan Cooper and Doug Petkanics, previously started Hyperpublic, a local information collector that was acquired last year by Groupon.

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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