Shaires Holdings (SHR), the AIM-listed investment company offering investors access to a portfolio of unquoted technology and artificial intelligence (AI) companies, including one seeking to revive woolly mammoths, is up and running after raising $14.3m (£10.5m) in this month’s share issue.
The former Jade Road Asian private equity fund, which changed its name and investment objective in May, drew in $3.4m from retail investors and $10.9m from institutions for the fund raise launched on 13 August and extended last week.
A total of 715,306 new shares were subscribed for at $20, an 18% discount to the $24.50 price of the ordinary shares before the fund raise. Trading in the ordinaries was suspended during the “capital access window” but resumed today.
Combined with two earlier fund raises in February and July, Shaires has around $78m in capital and “contributed assets” from holders of private tech companies looking to switch into the London-listed company.
Including its rights to buy a further $30m of contributed shares, Shaires has $108m (£79.3m), ahead of its initial $100m target.
Executive chair Suhail Rizvi said: “We set out to establish the first AIM-quoted company of its kind, one created to give public market investors direct exposure to the leaders of the AI supercycle. That company now exists, funded, with binding agreements for over $100m of capital and assets, and with a register that spans institutions, founders and more than six hundred and seventy new private investors.”
Chief executive Vivek Seth said the company would shift its focus to deploying the capital and reporting on its investments, with shareholders awaiting the first net asset value (NAV).
“We have a pipeline in excess of US$500m and are in active conversations with institutions who want to participate in what comes next. Shareholders should expect a steady cadence of announcements as those discussions convert, together with regular reporting on portfolio valuation so that the market can assess our progress on its own terms,” Seth said.
At the launch of its fund raise, Shaires said it had an option agreement with Rizvi Traverse, a company linked to Suhail Rizvi, to buy up to $40m of interests in special purpose vehicles holding both direct and indirect stakes in Anthropic, the AI developer reportedly heading for a $2bn flotation this autumn, Stripe, a $159bn payments provider, and Figure AI, a $39bn robotics company.
It also said it had committed to $47m of investments in: Bytedance, the company behind short videos app TikTok; Colossal Biosciences, the Dallas-based “de-extinction” company looking to revive woolly mammoths; SandboxAQ, an AI and quantum computing developer; and MoonshotAI, the Chinese AI research lab.
Colossal last year used CRISPR gene-editing technology to create three puppies of dire wolf, which went extinct over 10,000 years ago, although there is debate over whether they are in fact modified grey wolves. This week Ben Lamm, CEO and co-founder of the $10bn company, told TIME magazine that its ambition to implant a mammoth embryo into an elephant with a birth date in 2028 would not be achieved until the early 2030s.
You can read QuotedData’s initial note on Shaires here.
Our view
James Carthew, head of investment company research at QuotedData, said: “Shaires has met its initial $100m target. It will be interesting to see the shape of the portfolio once the in-kind transactions are complete. I am hoping that the company will also issue an NAV soon and clarify some elements of the structure such as the terms of the management incentive plan, which feels to me like a prerequisite for achieving its ambitions of growing further.”
