As of May 10, Infinity Ventures in Asia and e.ventures in the US and Europe have rebranded together as Headline. The conversation began years ago, and after 10 years of successful collaboration in sourcing unicorns globally, we’re finally making it official. Moving forward, Infinity Venture’s existing offices in Beijing, Taipei, and Tokyo will be known as Headline - Asia. Headline also have offices in San Francisco, Berlin, Paris, and São Paulo.

What Excites Us

• Making our relationship with e.ventures official and rebranding together under Headline makes us a more cohesive global brand. We’ll have faster access and more insight into global data utilizing our respective proprietary data platforms, which in turn allows us to invest in rising trends earlier.
• With this partnership, the US, EU, South American teams will bring more interesting deals to the Asian market, and utilizing our strong network connections and relationships on this side of the world, we can broker promising joint ventures and help them localize in Asia.
• We will be three independently operated funds, but with tighter collaboration and infrastructure. With common fundraising power and a shared global branding, we will be able to provide more resources to our portfolios and potential startups.

History

Infinity Ventures (Asia) and e.ventures (Europe and US) are brands of early stage VC funds globally that have been working together for over a decade. Together, we’ve decided to rebrand into a new global identity so that we can actually have more resources, more capacity to do cross-border international deals together.

The idea first came up five years ago as we started developing our cross border deal flows, some of the greatest successes of the past each fund has had, such as Groupon, Farfetch, and Yeahka have emerged from this teamwork. For ten years, the two funds have helped one another on a deal-by-deal basis. We have studied investment opportunities using common infrastructure for technology like EVA, our deal sourcing software, and Athena, our due diligence platform.

The relationship between Infinity Ventures and e.ventures has been mutually beneficial. Each generation of funds has had some winners from this association. The greatest lesson we have learned from our decade-long relationship is that with the aid of global, cross-regional knowledge, we have been able to catch the wave on new internet trends rising in one part of the world and riding it out to another.

e.ventures’ European team first invested in Groupon, or rather, the company that became Groupon International. They alerted us to this new category of business that was growing very rapidly and suggested we look for such an opportunity in Asia. Ultimately, this led to us launching a Groupon-like business of our own in Japan as our first venture building project. Within months after launch, our venture became number one in Japan and subsequently became the office for Groupon Japan. A year and a half later, when Groupon filed to go public in the US, we were able to exit our stake in the joint venture pre-IPO.

Farfetch is one of the largest fashion e-commerce sites. Infinity Ventures’ founder Akio Tanaka met the CEO of Farfetch at e.ventures offsite in Brazil eight years ago and at the time, Farfetch was very small. Farfetch CEO José Neves approached Akio and said, “Hey Akio, we’re going to be very big in a few years, and when we are big, we want to go after the Japanese market as well. I heard from e.ventures you can actually help us build the business there.” At the time, despite having no idea what he was talking about at the time, Akio shook hands with CEO José and said, “Okay, if you’re ready, we’ll be ready in Japan and we can help you do the Japan expansion.”

Two years later, when this interaction had long been buried in memory, Akio received a call from José, “Akio, now we’re doing half a billion a year in revenue. We’re ready to go to Japan. Are you guys ready?” Of course, with that kind of growth rate, we couldn’t say no. Infinity Ventures in turn helped him Farfetch Japan, and just like Groupon, exited our investment on their path to IPO.

Yeahka was a company from Infinity Ventures’ portfolio that went IPO in Hong Kong last year, and as the largest QR code payment aggregator in China, it was one of the big wins from Fund II. It debuted at HK$16 on HKEX back in June 2020, and its share price has grown five times to over HK$80 since its debut, becoming one of the hottest stocks among HK-listed tech companies. We invited e.ventures’ growth fund to join the late rounds of Yeakha, and they were able to exit their investment on Yeakha’s path to IPO, garnering another win for their fund through our partnership.

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