Asia West Inc. is a professional fund management firm specializing in early-stage companies with innovative technologies poised to disrupt large, mature industries. We take a hands-on approach to managing our investment portfolio and actively work alongside management to realize the key growth milestones of revenue traction and cash flow breakeven while positioning for commercial scale and exit.
Asia West is the Fund Manager for the TMC Emerging Technology Fund, an early-stage venture fund formed in partnership with The Mortgage Collaborative, the nation’s largest cooperative network of independent mortgage lenders. Our target investments include technologies and applications that improve the efficiency of manufacturing and servicing mortgages, improve customer experience, improve quality and otherwise improve the profitability of mortgage origination. The Fund’s unique value proposition resides in the fact that its Limited Partners, as consumers of technology, are able to screen prospective investments from a market perspective and accelerate market traction and scale by serving as reference customers. Building the sales channel is one of the biggest hurdles facing early-stage companies and we tackle this risk head-on.
Asia West previously managed the Asia West Environment Fund LP (now completed), an early-stage venture program investing in Western companies with technologies that are commercially and environmentally relevant to Asia, specifically China. In this program, our primary focus was on technologies that recycle or up-cycle scrap materials into high-value products leveraging the intrinsic biological, chemical or mechanical properties of the scrap material to maximize value recapture.
One of our premier investments was E-Leather Ltd., a UK-manufacturer of E-Leather-branded composite leather-on-a-roll that is manufactured from leather tannery scrap. E-Leather competes with natural hide leather on aesthetics, performance and price. Asia West led the Series A round when E-Leather was little more than a twinkle in the founder’s eye. We led subsequent rounds to build a world-class manufacturing plant and scale the organization globally. Today, E-Leather has emerged as the world’s leading supplier of leather upholstery for commercial aircraft and a category leader in leather upholstery in the bus and rail sectors. E-Leather announced a long-term, strategic innovation partnership with Nike in 2017 to introduce “Flyleather“, new super-lightweight, high performance material to the sporting footwear brand. This partnership is poised to catapult growth and secure E-Leather’s position as one of the world’s finest examples of a successful cleantech investment.