China’s largest insurer Ping An Insurance Group is looking to deploy another $100 million from Ping An Global Voyager Fund, its first overseas $1-billion fund, by the end of 2018.
In an interaction with DEALSTREETASIA, Ping An Group chief innovation officer and Ping An Global Voyager Fund CEO Jonathan Larsen said the fund has deployed about $100 million so far. It made its first investment last September in European fintech company 10x Future Technologies.
Managed by Larsen from Hong Kong, the Global Voyager Fund was launched in May 2017 with a mandate to invest in fintech and healthtech businesses outside China to accelerate Ping An’s digital transformation.
The fund typically cuts checks between $15 million and $30 million. At the same time, it is open to inject up to $100 million in a single startup if it saw an opportunity to do so, Larsen said.
“The fund is open-ended because it’s strategic nature. There may be something where we realise value and there may be something that we’d like to hold [on to] indefinitely. Our basic thesis is that typically we’d take a 10-20 per cent stake in the company and we do that in companies that have strong, intrinsic trajectories that can generate strong, standalone value over time.
“On top of that, we want to have some co-operation that allows us to access and then deploy the core capabilities of these companies within our business ecosystem and more generally, in the China market in the first instant,” he said.
The fund recently invested in Israel-based startup MeMed Diagnostics and US-based startup TytoCare. Global Voyager Fund’s current investments are largely scattered across the globe and Larsen, a former Citigroup banker, said it currently tracks about 7,500 healthtech and fintech companies.
Ping An has Southeast Asia on its radar too. The Chinese insurance giant has invested in ride-hailing unicorn Grab and is in the midst of setting up a joint venture which will see its telemedicine arm Ping An Good Doctor offer medical services via Grab’s app. The joint venture with Grab will also enable Ping An to enter 225 cities across eight countries in the region.
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