Aussie billionaire Alex Waislitz doubles his money in crypto investment amid IPO bonanza

Thorney Chairman Alex Waislitz at Thorney AGM in Melbourne. Picture: David Geraghty, The Australian.

Billionaire Alex Waislitz has had a good start to the year, doubling his money on a couple of diverse investments as he chases big returns from stockmarket float candidates.

Waislitz was a pre-IPO investor in Australian cryptocurrency payments firm Banxa, which listed on the TSX Venture Exchange in Canada earlier this month.

Banxa offers payment services for cryptocurrency investors, converting normal currency to crypto via its gateway. It reportedly processes more than $100m in transactions every quarter and announced recently that it had processed almost $3m on a single day.

It commenced at slightly less than $C1 and rose to $C1.92 on its first day of trading in the first week of January. At one stage it almost doubled in value again but has since settled back to trade at $C2.25 at the end of last week.

At that value it means Waislitz is up more than 100 per cent on his investment so far, having bought into Banxa in January last year via his Thorney Investments and listed investment company Thorney Technologies when Banxa raised $2m in a pre-float Series A round.

Waislitz has also recently doubled his money in another float candidate called AP Ventures, the venture capital firm backed by billionaires Nick Molnar and Anthony Eisen of Afterpay fame.

AP Ventures, which Waislitz has predicted to be heading for an initial public offering this year, raised $50m from investors including Waislitz last year and put some of the funds into Shanghai start-up Happay.

Last week AP Ventures told its shareholders that it had struck a deal to invest up to $10m into financial data platform Basiq through the acquisition of convertible notes.

Basiq’s customers include UBank, Beforepay and other Australian fintech companies, and counts the venture capital arms of Westpac and National Australia Bank as investors.

At the same time, AP Ventures completed a $18.5m placement with New York technology investment fund Woodson Capital — which also has a stake in Afterpay.

The placement was completed at a price of 10c per share and sees Woodson emerge with a 10 per cent stake. The deal also doubles the value of Waislitz’s initial stake in AP Ventures.

Waislitz invests in a range of small and mid-cap stocks and unlisted companies via his privately owned Thorney Investments — which has more than $1bn in assets and celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2018 — and the two listed LICs it manages, Thorney Opportunities and Thorney Technologies (TEK).

The technology stock and investment-focused TEK holds a combination of listed shares that have performed well in the past, including market darling Afterpay and Zip. He will often take profits from holdings in fast-growing listed companies such as Afterpay, in which TEK has a small stake, and reinvest the funds in other companies such as Zip or in private companies that look headed for the market.

“Our deep networks in Australia, the US and Israel are putting forward some highly prospective candidates which meet our mandate of investing in disruptive, scalable companies in the medtech, biotech, agtech, edtech, fintech, AI, robotics and related spaces,” Waislitz told the market late last year.

“Witnessing the level of exciting deal flow provided us with considerable encouragement to take in fresh capital to participate in the best of these new opportunities without liquidating some existing positions.”

Among Waislitz’s investments that are heading to an IPO this year is eToro, the Israeli foreign exchange and contracts for difference broker that sponsored the Wallabies national rugby union team last year.

EToro is reportedly set for a $US5bn float on the Nasdaq exchange in the US, most likely in the second quarter of 2021.

Thorney and its associated entities are also investors in Perth internet services provider Pentanet, which is set for an ASX listing next week at a 25c per share float price.

Pentanet has pitched itself as a low-cost alternative to the NBN. Waislitz’s investment vehicles will emerge with a 5.5 per cent stake upon listing, according to the company’s prospectus.

It would follow the successful IPO of debt payment fintech Credit Clear, which has doubled in value for Thorney and other investors since floating on the ASX last October.