AngelList raises $400m from China’s CSC Group

The fund, called CSC Upshot, is said to represent the largest investment by a Chinese PE firm in a US fund, as well as the largest single pool of capital devoted to early-stage start-ups.

The $400 million will be spread out over six to eight years, with AngelList planning to deploy $20-30 million from the new fund in the first year, Naval Ravikant, the funding platform's co-founder, told TechCrunch. It will typically target growth and later stage start-ups, with a view to accelerating expansion in China.

AngleList has built a syndicate model that allows angel investors to draw in more capital from their personal networks. To date, it has 4,400 investors operating across 165 syndicates. Previously, the funding platform had raised $205 million from investors - including $43 million from institutional investors - to invest across 650 start-ups such as Uber.

"Firms often raise more money to get more fees. But with our model, we can just add more syndicate leads so we can keep putting money into the same kind of companies at the same stage," Ravikant said in the interview. "CSC Upshot is about Chinese LPs expanding globally and showing that Chinese companies can go out globally and compete in a way that gets them exposure at the very earliest stage, instead of waiting for the Series D round."

CSC Group, which has more than $12 billion under management, listed on the National Equities Exchange and Quotations (NEEQ), an over-the-counter market in China, in March. It is the second domestic PE firm to list on the NEEQ, also known as the new third board, after JD Capital.

CSC Upshot allows Chinese investors to diversify from domestic stock market into US start-ups more directly. CSC eventually wants to get exposure to every stage of venture investing - from seed to pre-IPO, Veronica Wu, president of CSC Venture, told The Wall Street Journal.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Venture
• Fundraising
• Expansion
• Early-stage
• North America
• China
• Venture
• seed
• Growth capital
• Fundraising
• USA