From Sifted (Eurotech), May 10:
Shareholder voting platform Tumelo just raised a $19m Series A to take on America — and the world’s biggest fund managers
Tumelo could be called a university spinout — but it’s not in the same vein as the life sciences and engineering startups that usually come out of Europe’s academic institutions.
Its three cofounders, who met at Cambridge, wanted their alma mater’s £4bn endowment fund to be a more engaged shareholder. They were inspired by fossil fuel divestment campaigns at Harvard’s equivalent.
But then they began looking beyond their university halls and founded Tumelo, which aims to take shareholder activism to retail investors who invest through fund managers.
Two years after launching, it’s just raised a $19m Series A led by the US-based fintech investor Treasury, run by the cofounders of Betterment, Acorns and Say Technologies.
“We wanted to focus on the idea that if you own shares in a company, however intermediated you are, you should have some influence over the issues that are important to you,” Tumelo’s CEO and cofounder Georgia Stewart tells Sifted.
“If you own shares in a company, however intermediated you are, you should have some influence”
Tumelo became interested in the mechanism just as shareholder activism was having its moment in the sun. US hedge fund Elliott Management had garnered global attention with its push for Samsung to return $10bn to shareholders in 2016, and its successful campaign calling for Hyundai to cancel a corporate restructuring in 2018.
Then last summer, the small activist investor Engine No.1 shocked the corporate world and showed that you don’t have to be big to make a difference when it booted three members off the $265bn US oil and gas giant Exxon’s board, despite owning a mere 0.02% of the company.
Some fintechs like Tulipshare or Clim8 have focused on engaging retail investors directly, respectively enabling them to join cumulative shareholder votes or pick sustainable investment portfolios.
But Tumelo is focused on closing the circuit between disengaged investors — typically those whose money is invested in pension funds — and the hedge fund managers who vote on their behalf....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also:
- Governance: The Growing Concentration of ETF (and mutual fund) Voting Power
- Index Funds, Political Agendas and The Public Interest
- Voting Rights For the Underlying Shares In an ETF: Effective January 1 BlackRock Will Allow Institutional Investors In Its Funds To Vote The Proxies
- "Charlie Munger doesn’t think Larry Fink should be running the world." (BRK; BLK)
- BlackRock And Larry Fink's Power (BLK)
— INVESTMENT HULK (@INVESTMENTSHULK) December 22, 2021
