NEWS: Cradle fund draws good response

PETALING JAYA: A month into its launch, Cradle Investment Programme’s commercialisation fund has already attracted about 100 applicants.

The fund, known as CIP500, was introduced to aid technopreneurs who want to commercialise their products but have limited resources.

CIP500 is a purely technology commercialisation fund that provides funding of up to RM500,000 per case to aid budding Malaysian companies.

Cradle chief executive officer Nazrin Hassan said the fact that the agency was able to attract a large number of applicants despite little promotion confirms the need for such a fund.

He said Cradle will aggressively promote CIP500 with a roadshow in the first quarter of next year because it wants even more applicants. After that, it will sift through the applications and select the best.

“Once we have the quantity, we hope the quality will be commensurate,” Nazrin said, adding that Cradle has set a modest target for CIP500. It is aiming to fund about 30 applicants, but if there are more quality proposals than that, it may reconsider its target.

There’s more

Besides pushing commercialisation activities, Nazrin said, CIP500 also takes into consideration the potential of a product to be marketed one to two years after it receives Cradle funding.

Being a results-oriented organisation, it is Cradle’s aim to make international champions out of local innovation companies.

“(The real measure) is not about how many technopreneurs have received the funding but how many have become successful as a result of getting funded,” Nazrin said.

Cradle also hopes to enrich the funding ecosystem by getting the private sector to lend a helping hand.

One of the plans Cradle has, Nazrin said, is to encourage co-investment deals between the pre-seed agency and other private-sector parties.

“The ecosystem cannot survive solely on government funding and this should not be the case,” he said.

Nazrin admitted that it will be quite a task to strike co-investment deals with private companies, given that these are comfortable in their traditional domains, but it is not impossible.

He said that as markets become more efficient and more foreign players come in, arbitraging opportunities will get smaller and the only way to get higher returns will be to take higher risks. “That’s when you’ll have a private sector that is strong enough to invest in (higher risk) technology deals,” he said.