Investable Universe

When this year’s covid-related social and economic disruptions put a stop to venture capital roadshows, one Israeli investment firm knew exactly what to do. They disrupted the venture capital roadshow itself. The resulting platform, Investination—a brainchild of Israeli-American real estate and technology investment firm Besadno Group—has emerged this year as a kind of “virtual roadshow” for Israeli startups in proptech (commercial real estate technology), contech (construction technology), agtech (agriculture technology), and other emerging sub-sectors. We talk to Investination CEO Oded Eliashiv about the new platform...and an unusually fertile period for Israeli innovation in real estate and construction technologies. 

John Ellis has been in around the news business (and the American political establishment) for most of his adult life, working for NBC News, the Boston Global, CNBC, Fox News Elections and Business News and Newscorp. He also served as a Senior Fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics and was a Senior Fellow at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (2002-2004), where he was awarded the Outstanding Civilian Service Award by the U.S. Army for his work on "Future Threats." Today he is the publisher and guiding light of News Items, a daily newsletter that covers global politics, financial news, advanced technologies and science. On Friday November 5, as election returns pointed to victory for Democratic Challenger Joe Biden, John Ellis offered his thoughts on the surprising Republican performance, recalls warning President Donald Trump about the imminent danger of covid-19 in January 2020, and talks about how private equity may be in for a rude awakening in 2021. 

Publicly traded net-lease REIT pioneer W.P. Carey pioneered the sale-leaseback for real estate investment 50 years ago in the U.S., and has helped to grow and professionalize the European market in the decades since. We talk to their European head, Christopher Mertlitz, on the investment outlook for sale leasebacks in Europe since the onset of covid, and his firm's approach to identifying "mission-critical" assets across national borders. 

Investment startup FarmTogether, which has received backing from Franklin Templeton Legg Mason and several venture capital partners, gives accredited investors direct access to fractional ownership in U.S. farmland, a $2.5 trillion asset class traditionally owned by actual farmers or very large institutional investors.

In this episode, we talk to founder and CEO Artem Milinchuk, who brings to bear more than a decade of finance experience in food, farmland and agriculture. Prior to founding FarmTogether, he was CFO/VP of Operations at Full Harvest Technology, a venture-capital-funded B2B platform for buying and selling produce. He also brings institutional knowledge, notably from the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, as well as commodity investor Sprott Resources Holdings of Canada, E&Y, and PwC. We spoke with him about FarmTogether's business model and growth plans, the future of investing in U.S. farmland and crops, trends in ag-tech, regenerative agriculture, and more.    

Bitcoin: Political protest vote, futuristic commodity, arcane fade, environmental conundrum, or genuine portfolio hedge--it's outperformed all other asset classes in 2020 for the year to date. Brian Estes, Chief Investment Officer of Off the Chain Capital, a $40 million long-only, non-leveraged bitcoin hedge fund that has outperformed all other crypto funds, the spot price of bitcoin and the S&P 500 over the past three years, views bitcoin as a combination of many (if not all) of the above: as a scarce asset with at least as much intrinsic value as the U.S. dollar (which is to say, none). He sits down for a philosophical conversation with Investable Universe about the future of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies through the lens of value investing. 

Dr. Christina Lampe-Önnerud, former Boston-Power CEO, founder and CEO of Cadenza Innovation, is a world-renowned expert on battery architecture and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. In March, Investable Universe spoke with Dr. Lampe-Önnerud following her address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (and just prior to global economic lockdowns in response to the covid-19 pandemic) about the global market for EV batteries, how Cadenza Innovation is revolutionizing lithium-ion battery technology, her firm's investors, and the renewable energy imperative. 

In August, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) granted its first-ever design certification of a small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) designed by Oregon-based NuScale power. This regulatory milestone--a key safety certification to commercializing and deploying the technology for clean energy production in the U.S. and globally--comes after a rigorous and costly multi-year process that was largely supported by NuScale's corporate backer, Fluor Corporation. We talked with NuScale's co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, José N. Reyes, PhD, a pioneer in next-generation nuclear engineering who actually designed the NuScale SMR, about what NRC certification means to NuScale's ability to enter new markets and draw new investors, nuclear energy's role in the renewables transition, and emerging new areas of application, such as space technology. 

The global farmland market has been valued at $9 trillion, $2.5 trillion of which is situated in the United States. While institutional ownership by pension funds and other long-term investors has been on the rise in recent decades, the majority of U.S. farms are still owned (as has long been the case) by farmers. Will this change as new technologies, global investors, and changing farmer demographics enter the mix? We talk to Jim McCandless, Head of Farmland, Real Estate and Private Markets at UBS, a firm with $1.6 billion in AUM invested in 228,000 U.S. farmland acres. He shares his insights on the dynamics of the U.S. farmland market, durable farmland investing, how to construct a crop portfolio and UBS's involvement with a pioneering new ESG program for farm management, Leading Harvest. 

Nickel--a scarce and environmentally burdensome metal that is needed for EV car batteries-- has become a headline commodity of late. Prices spiked earlier this summer when Tesla CEO Elon Musk promised a "giant" contract to any firm that could mine nickel efficiently and sustainably. His challenge gave weight to more recent market chatter that Tesla might be in talks with Canadian miner Giga Metals to secure a reliable North American source for the nickel it urgently needs. In advance of Tesla's upcoming 2020 Battery Day event, we talk to Ed Meir of Commodity Research Group for perspectives on nickel and other industrial metals as many parts of the globe continue to struggle with the challenges of covid-19. 

In August, HSBC announced a new joint venture with climate impact advisory and "natural capital" investment group Pollination. The two firms will join forces to launch family of funds giving investors  opportunities to invest directly in global sustainability initiatives around the original "real assets"--land, air, water and biosphere. On this episode, we talk about the challenge and opportunity of natural capital with Pollination Founding Partner Martijn Wilder, a pioneer in global climate law, and partner John Morton, former White House Senior Director for Energy and Climate Change at the National Security Council.