Korea
Saint Clair
Asia
Growth Venture Builder
Saint Clair Asia builds growing companies to the international standard, takes them across borders, and holds equity in them.
Capital and business cross borders only through structures they recognise.
Discuss your companyGrowth Venture Building
Growth Venture Building is venture building at the growth stage: the builder starts from a company that has already found its customers, builds the company to the international standard, takes it into international markets, and brings it the investment its growth requires. The builder works beside the founders and is paid in equity.
Venture building
Venture building usually starts with an idea and a team.
Growth Venture Building
Growth Venture Building starts with a company that already has customers.
Across Asia, a company at its start finds accelerators, incubators and seed investors in the region’s capital cities. A company that has found its customers at home faces a different task. To grow beyond its home market, it needs a structure foreign investors can enter, governance and accounts they can examine, a second market, and partners who stay for the work. Growth Venture Building is that work.
Saint Clair Asia is a Growth Venture Builder.
How Saint Clair Asia builds
Builds the company to the standard.
Saint Clair Asia brings the company’s structure, governance, accounts and documents to the standard international investors and partners apply. Where the law of the company’s country keeps foreign shareholders out of the operating company, Saint Clair Asia builds the holding structure through which they can invest.
Takes the company across borders.
Saint Clair Asia prepares the company’s entry into a second market, Europe first, and introduces the company to customers, partners and investors there.
Stays for the implementation.
The work on each company follows a written plan. Saint Clair Asia works with the founders until the plan is carried out: the structure in place, the governance working, the first contracts in the new market signed.
Holds equity.
Saint Clair Asia takes equity in place of fees, earned as the company reaches agreed milestones, and holds it. Saint Clair Asia’s return depends on the company’s growth, as the founders’ return does.
The companies
Saint Clair Asia works with a small number of companies at a time. Each company has customers and revenue in its home market, and a product or service that customers in another market can buy. Its founders want to build the company to the international standard, and to share its equity with partners who do the work beside them.
Where
Saint Clair Asia works across Asia from Seoul and Singapore: in Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Bangladesh. In each country, Saint Clair Asia works with a local partner who knows the country’s companies, law and investors.
Europe
Saint Clair works between Europe and Asia. Saint Clair Asia prepares each company it builds for European customers, partners and investors, and introduces the company to them. European corporates find in these companies customers, suppliers and partners whose documents, governance and accounts they can examine on their own terms. European investors find growing Asian companies built to the standard they already apply.
How Saint Clair Asia invests
Saint Clair Asia is the investment vehicle for Saint Clair’s Growth Venture Building across Asia, and holds the equity it earns in the companies it builds. Where a country justifies one, Saint Clair Asia forms a country vehicle with its local partners. The country vehicle holds the equity earned in that country, beside later investments there.
Saint Clair Asia’s investors are its members. Today its one member is Saint Clair Pte. Ltd.
Part of Saint Clair
Saint Clair Asia is part of Saint Clair, a cross-border investment firm. Saint Clair works to one standard, the one international capital applies when it evaluates and invests, and applies that standard in two fields. In Korea, Saint Clair develops the international market for Korean venture secondaries. Across Asia, Saint Clair Asia applies the same standard to growing companies, through Growth Venture Building.
Carl Härtlein
CEO & Managing Director
Carl Härtlein is the founder and CEO & Managing Director of Saint Clair.
Thirty years across technology entrepreneurship, international advisory, and corporate strategy, between European and Asian markets. Chair, Korean-Irish Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KICCI).
Contact
To discuss your company with Saint Clair Asia, write to contact@saintclair.sg.