Digital asset manager Bite Investments has launched its first-ever commingled private markets product, allowing investors to access a diversified allocation to alternatives with one investment.

The Bite Private Markets Portfolio offers exposure across investment strategies, geographies, and fund managers in one ticket. It will allocate capital into eight to 10 underlying top-tier funds, assessed and selected by the firm’s expert investment team.

The minimum investment size is US$100,000. The core sectors are healthcare, information technology, software, business services, financial services, consumer, and industrials.

Henry Talbot-Ponsonby, co-founder and president of Bite Investments, says: “The promise of alternatives is excess of returns in comparison to risk. For far too long, individual investors have not been able to capitalize on this. Through technology, we are now pleased to offer them exceptional access to the best parts of private markets via a single-ticket investment.”

There has been a rise in the number of private firms. Since 2000, buyout asset value has grown 3.5x faster than the capitalization of the public equity market, according to Bain’s Global Private Equity Report 2020.

“Historically, individual investors have neither had access to top fund managers, nor have they been able to reap the benefits and value created as companies stay private for longer. Tomorrow’s unicorns may never even go public,” says Anna Barath, investment director at Bite Investments.

Over the last three decades, private equity has been one of the best performing asset classes globally, according to McKinsey’s Global Private Markets Review 2020. However, due to a combination of high fees, high minimum investment amounts, and lack of access to top funds, wealth managers, registered investment advisers and financial advisers have not been able to access this investment strategy. As a result, high-net-worth investors are under-allocated as compared to other investors.

“By making alternatives more accessible to our clients, we are helping them diversify instantly. Using technology, we enable individual investors to access, unlock and invest bite-sized amounts into some of the most exciting private markets strategies out there,” Talbot-Ponsonby says.

Bite is majority owned by VCP Advisors, which is authorized and regulated by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and the Securities and Exchange Commission of the United States, the Financial Conduct Authority of the United Kingdom, and the Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong.