BrazilVenture arm of Sia Partners supports French real estate platform Livsty
Sia Partners’ venture capital arm Studio has made its second official investment. Following its first deal with e-commerce site Big Moustache, the consultancy has confirmed another with Livsty, as well as offering operational support to the new equity platform.
As consulting firms continue to bolster their venture capital capacities, Sia Partners last year announced the launch of its investment fund, Studio. With €4 million and Sia Partners as the sole stockholder, the investment fund will accompany select start-ups through their incubation and acceleration periods. Their first investment saw grooming industry disruptor Big Moustache receive a capital injection of €500,000 from the firm’s incubator arm, as Sia Partners anticipate significant growth in the online beauty and cosmetic industry until 2020.
Now, with a new investment in innovative real estate assets platform Livsty, Studio is once more offering both financial and practical assistance to a start-up. Livsty is dubbed in France as "a pioneering platform" aimed at making investing in equity releases accessible to everyone.
Livsty also hopes to improve social cohesion and empower marginalised groups to experience financial success, by bringing an appropriate financing solution to citizens, and aims to solve common financing problems of seniors by developing a standard property-linked investment product with a controlled risk for private investors.
As of December 2017, Livsty has begun receiving financial and operational support from Sia Partners and benefits from the firms' network and expertise in finance, operations, marketing and real estate. Sia Partners, who launched the start-up with the founder Gregoire Berger, will see Matthieu Courtecuisse (CEO of Sia Partners) and Elsa Martineau (Manager at Sia Partners) become participating board members on Livsty’s steering committees, as they are with Big Moustache. The ambition of Livsty for 2018 is to close another round of financing and bolster its base of clients and relations.
Consulting firms have made a priority of incubator and investment arms in recent years, with investment in innovative and disruptive companies offering firms the chance to gain lucrative returns from a myriad of new markets, particularly by backing new technological breakthroughs. In 2015, this saw KPMG launch their Ignition Centre, while in early 2017 Capgemini launched an incubator to match FinTechs with corporate investors. Similarly, BCG has together with oil giant Shell backed a London-based startup that wants to challenge Uber.
