GCAIA Capital Year End Summary for 2021

Dear Investors,

2021 turned out to be quite a challenging year for everyone and all businesses. It was especially true for the start ups. The work-from-home and persistent threat of corona virus created a very difficult environment for small start ups to operate and to thrive. This has a direct impact on our investments. We spent a lot of time searching for quality startups to invest in. Currently, there are a lot of life science and bio-pharma startups in the markets. However, we already have a few life science companies in our portfolio. We would like to diversify our holdings to find startups in other sectors. That turned out to be somehow difficult. Therefore, after much due diligence work, we only invested in one company in 2021. Advanced Silicon Group develops and markets biosensors. Although its market is in life science, the principle theory for the sensors is based on semiconductor applications. As a matter of fact, the owner has BS, MS and Ph.D. degrees from MIT Electrical Engineering Department.

As stated in our 2020 year end summary, we had planned the year 2021 with some limited expectation that the pandemic will be subsided if not completely eliminated. However, with the Covid-19 persistently present, many companies have reduced their operation and hence their fundraising activities. We reviewed a dozen companies, but eventually decided to only invest in one.

Even though we did not invest a lot in 2021, we have been in touch with many companies we have already invested in. In general, the software companies were doing better than manufacturing companies. This is easy to understand as it is fairly easy for software companies to smoothly transition to work from home. Case in point, Corsha team has been able to work from home to complete its projects on time and meet its revenue projections. Corsha is in the process of raising Series-A round funding in the coming months. Not all manufacturing companies were struggling; Bounced Imaging has overcome the supply chain issues and achieved the revenue target for 2021. It also expanded its user base and has enough backlogs for the entire 2022 and beyond. While Bounced Imaging is thriving, Everix, which produces optical filters, is struggling. It has just gone through a restructuring board. We hope the new board will guide Everix back to its feet again. Another our invested company doing well is S2 Genomic. The company developed a SigulatorTM system that can more efficiently produce single cells for the life science community. They have been achieving its delivery target throughout the year. The company shipped 14 systems (MSRP is $350,000.00 per system) in Q3 2021, the latest data available to us. They expect to deliver 60 systems total world wide in 2021.

In 2022, we will continue to look for quality startups to invest in. Right now, we are doing due diligence on two companies. One company has developed a new coating technology on rebar. They believe their technology can help avoid building collapse due to structure corrosion, like what happened in Florida condo not long ago. We hope we will find it worth investing. We will inform everyone of any progress as soon as they become available.

GCAIA Capital Management Team

Please Login to Comment.