Skypointer Capital last month announced a final close on $30 million for its debut fund, but the Miami-based firm has been deploying capital since its first close in 2022. That includes commitments as a fund of funds to 10 other venture funds across the US, Europe and Latin America of roughly $1.5 million each.
The firm’s roles as a limited partner through its fund of funds strategy and as a VC fund investing directly in companies are both central to Skypointer’s allocation strategy, partner Daniel Sakovics tells Venture Capital Journal.
“If you look at the largest and most sophisticated capital allocators – endowments, sovereign wealth funds, etcetera – a lot of them invest in this model that combines the fund of funds and direct [investment] approach,” he explains. “And we’re making that strategy accessible to family offices who maybe don’t have that volume of capital or the resources internally to be able to allocate that to venture in that manner.”
Skypointer’s fund of funds strategy is suited to family offices that have specialized in asset classes like real estate or private debt and lack the internal know-how with regard to venture capital, Sakovics says.
The FO pitch
“Venture’s such a fast-moving market that it’s difficult to have a team that’s only part-time dedicated to venture,” he notes. “Many larger family offices maybe haven’t built out that expertise internally and prefer to outsource it to someone like us.”
Another reason family offices are drawn to Skypointer is its ability to invest directly in companies. “We often build out [special purpose vehicles] that allow our investors to increase their exposure to specific companies, verticals and geographies that they have an interest in, whether it’s because of their family business or their pre-existing expertise or just in terms of their portfolio allocation,” says Sakovics.
Sakovics founded the firm with fellow partners Manuel Serna and Pablo Ortega in 2022. Skypointer’s total assets under management, including those in SPVs, is around $40 million.
The firm will likely use 60 percent of its new fund for direct investments in companies and the remaining 40 percent for commitments to other venture funds, with a focus on emerging managers that bring extensive venture expertise.
“Venture’s such a fast-moving market that it’s difficult [for a family office] to have a team that’s only part-time dedicated to venture”
Daniel Sakovics, Skypointer
“We’re giving our investors broad access to the asset class through a single vehicle with exposure from pre-seed in Silicon Valley to growth companies in Germany,” Sakovics says. “That’s achieved by relying on sourcing through funds that are experts within their sector, within their geography, to find the best companies within those areas that we want to allocate to rather than through a ‘spray-and-pray mechanism.’ In the growth stage, we concentrate capital in the breakout companies at a de-risked stage.”
Proaltus Capital Partners, a multifamily office with headquarters in Madrid, is the anchor investor in the debut fund and provides back-office and regulatory infrastructure. Before joining Skypointer, Ortega served as head of alternative investments at Proaltus for seven years.
In addition to family offices, Skypointer’s LPs include some high-net-worth individual investors that Sakovics, Ortega and Serna have worked with either at prior firms or through their networks.
About 60 percent of both the venture funds that Skypointer allocates to and its direct investments are based in the US, with 30 percent in Europe and 10 percent in Latin America.
Looking for outperformers
Smaller emerging funds have been shown to outperform the general venture market and “those are exactly the types of managers that we’re targeting,” Sakovics notes. Typically, these are funds below $150 million, focusing at the seed stage.
“For those types of managers, one company that reaches a billion-dollar valuation can mean returning the entire fund. You don’t need $5 billion or $10 billion companies,” he says. “That’s where you can get really outlier outcomes from funds that are returning up to 5x to 6x the fund [size]. That’s where we decided to focus the fund of funds segment, where we see a high level of alpha.”
He declined to name any of the emerging funds Skypointer has committed to so far.
While he’s fully aware that not all of the funds that Skypointer allocates to will achieve outsized returns, Sakovics says the firm wants to “back funds that are set up to accomplish those kinds of returns.”
Returns of that size are mostly out of reach for many venture firms whose total assets under management have ballooned in recent years, prompting a change in strategy to focus more on late-stage investments, especially when the funds prioritize their management fee, he adds. Skypointer hopes to unlock superior returns through commitments to funds incentivized by carried interest.
Closer to liquidity
The funds that Skypointer commits to serve as scouts that help the firm identify new opportunities at an early stage. For direct investments, however, Skypointer prefers to wait for companies to mature and “enter into the sweet spot where we like to invest, which is already where we can see several years of track record and the companies already have working unit economics,” Sakovics says. The firm also analyzes a company’s sales cycle and the timeframe needed to recoup its customer acquisition costs to confirm how close it is to profitability.
Investing only on growth-stage companies “shortens the time to liquidity,” notes Sakovics. “Typically on a direct investment, we’re investing with a three- to five-year time horizon in mind, so that means that we’ll be returning capital a lot sooner than many other funds that are only focused on the early stage.”
The 14 direct investments that Skypointer has made so far include an artificial intelligence company that has reached decacorn status: Scale AI, whose platform is designed to provide training and validation data for AI applications. The company raised $1 billion in a round led by Accel in May that reportedly valued it at $13.8 billion.
Skypointer’s other investments include Verkada, a cloud-based physical security products provider; Curve, whose banking platform consolidates multiple cards and accounts into a single smart card and application; and Lunar, developer of a digital banking platform meant to enable online money transfers and payments.
The firm’s partners work closely with about six advisers on a regular basis. These include Fernando Luque, former investment director at Temasek, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, who “supports us quite closely, particularly on the investment side” as a member of Skypointer’s investment committee, says Sakovics.
Luque plays an important role because “he brings real depth of experience because he’s been investing for over 30 years now, so he’s seen it all,” Sakovics adds.
In a recent deal that Sakovics initially viewed favorably from one perspective, Luque provided a different angle informed by his prior experience in the same sector, enriching the team’s decision-making process, he says. Skypointer ultimately decided to pass on the deal, in part because of that guidance.
Having advisers within assorted industry verticals allows Skypointer to consult with the appropriate people when investing in a particular vertical.
“We’re financial experts, but we’re not industry experts because we’re investing as generalists,” Sakovics notes. “So we often leverage those networks that are either built through our fund or through our advisory network to dive deeper on opportunities that we’re analyzing.”
Skypointer Capital last month announced a final close on $30 million for its debut fund, but the Miami-based firm has been deploying capital since its first close in 2022. That includes commitments as a fund of funds to 10 other venture funds across the US, Europe and Latin America of roughly $1.5 million each.
The firm’s roles as a limited partner through its fund of funds strategy and as a VC fund investing directly in companies are both central to Skypointer’s allocation strategy, partner Daniel Sakovics tells Venture Capital Journal.
“If you look at the largest and most sophisticated capital allocators – endowments, sovereign wealth funds, etcetera – a lot of them invest in this model that combines the fund of funds and direct [investment] approach,” he explains. “And we’re making that strategy accessible to family offices who maybe don’t have that volume of capital or the resources internally to be able to allocate that to venture in that manner.”
Skypointer’s fund of funds strategy is suited to family offices that have specialized in asset classes like real estate or private debt and lack the internal know-how with regard to venture capital, Sakovics says.
The FO pitch
“Venture’s such a fast-moving market that it’s difficult to have a team that’s only part-time dedicated to venture,” he notes. “Many larger family offices maybe haven’t built out that expertise internally and prefer to outsource it to someone like us.”
Another reason family offices are drawn to Skypointer is its ability to invest directly in companies. “We often build out [special purpose vehicles] that allow our investors to increase their exposure to specific companies, verticals and geographies that they have an interest in, whether it’s because of their family business or their pre-existing expertise or just in terms of their portfolio allocation,” says Sakovics.
Sakovics founded the firm with fellow partners Manuel Serna and Pablo Ortega in 2022. Skypointer’s total assets under management, including those in SPVs, is around $40 million.
The firm will likely use 60 percent of its new fund for direct investments in companies and the remaining 40 percent for commitments to other venture funds, with a focus on emerging managers that bring extensive venture expertise.
“Venture’s such a fast-moving market that it’s difficult [for a family office] to have a team that’s only part-time dedicated to venture”
Daniel Sakovics, Skypointer
“We’re giving our investors broad access to the asset class through a single vehicle with exposure from pre-seed in Silicon Valley to growth companies in Germany,” Sakovics says. “That’s achieved by relying on sourcing through funds that are experts within their sector, within their geography, to find the best companies within those areas that we want to allocate to rather than through a ‘spray-and-pray mechanism.’ In the growth stage, we concentrate capital in the breakout companies at a de-risked stage.”
Proaltus Capital Partners, a multifamily office with headquarters in Madrid, is the anchor investor in the debut fund and provides back-office and regulatory infrastructure. Before joining Skypointer, Ortega served as head of alternative investments at Proaltus for seven years.
In addition to family offices, Skypointer’s LPs include some high-net-worth individual investors that Sakovics, Ortega and Serna have worked with either at prior firms or through their networks.
About 60 percent of both the venture funds that Skypointer allocates to and its direct investments are based in the US, with 30 percent in Europe and 10 percent in Latin America.
Looking for outperformers
Smaller emerging funds have been shown to outperform the general venture market and “those are exactly the types of managers that we’re targeting,” Sakovics notes. Typically, these are funds below $150 million, focusing at the seed stage.
“For those types of managers, one company that reaches a billion-dollar valuation can mean returning the entire fund. You don’t need $5 billion or $10 billion companies,” he says. “That’s where you can get really outlier outcomes from funds that are returning up to 5x to 6x the fund [size]. That’s where we decided to focus the fund of funds segment, where we see a high level of alpha.”
He declined to name any of the emerging funds Skypointer has committed to so far.
While he’s fully aware that not all of the funds that Skypointer allocates to will achieve outsized returns, Sakovics says the firm wants to “back funds that are set up to accomplish those kinds of returns.”
Returns of that size are mostly out of reach for many venture firms whose total assets under management have ballooned in recent years, prompting a change in strategy to focus more on late-stage investments, especially when the funds prioritize their management fee, he adds. Skypointer hopes to unlock superior returns through commitments to funds incentivized by carried interest.
Closer to liquidity
The funds that Skypointer commits to serve as scouts that help the firm identify new opportunities at an early stage. For direct investments, however, Skypointer prefers to wait for companies to mature and “enter into the sweet spot where we like to invest, which is already where we can see several years of track record and the companies already have working unit economics,” Sakovics says. The firm also analyzes a company’s sales cycle and the timeframe needed to recoup its customer acquisition costs to confirm how close it is to profitability.
Investing only on growth-stage companies “shortens the time to liquidity,” notes Sakovics. “Typically on a direct investment, we’re investing with a three- to five-year time horizon in mind, so that means that we’ll be returning capital a lot sooner than many other funds that are only focused on the early stage.”
The 14 direct investments that Skypointer has made so far include an artificial intelligence company that has reached decacorn status: Scale AI, whose platform is designed to provide training and validation data for AI applications. The company raised $1 billion in a round led by Accel in May that reportedly valued it at $13.8 billion.
Skypointer’s other investments include Verkada, a cloud-based physical security products provider; Curve, whose banking platform consolidates multiple cards and accounts into a single smart card and application; and Lunar, developer of a digital banking platform meant to enable online money transfers and payments.
The firm’s partners work closely with about six advisers on a regular basis. These include Fernando Luque, former investment director at Temasek, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, who “supports us quite closely, particularly on the investment side” as a member of Skypointer’s investment committee, says Sakovics.
Luque plays an important role because “he brings real depth of experience because he’s been investing for over 30 years now, so he’s seen it all,” Sakovics adds.
In a recent deal that Sakovics initially viewed favorably from one perspective, Luque provided a different angle informed by his prior experience in the same sector, enriching the team’s decision-making process, he says. Skypointer ultimately decided to pass on the deal, in part because of that guidance.
Having advisers within assorted industry verticals allows Skypointer to consult with the appropriate people when investing in a particular vertical.
“We’re financial experts, but we’re not industry experts because we’re investing as generalists,” Sakovics notes. “So we often leverage those networks that are either built through our fund or through our advisory network to dive deeper on opportunities that we’re analyzing.”
