Organisation:
Singapore Academy of Law, Singapore Venture Capital & Private Equity Association, Clifford Chance
Resource Links:
VIMA handbook and templates, Link
Clifford Capital VIMA Chatbot and Questionnaire, Link
My Key Takeaways
Founders and investors often emerge with plenty of battle scars from the immense time and costs spent negotiating each investment from scratch.
I found this open/free set of Venture Capital Investment Model Agreements (VIMA) helpful for investors and founders to cut down on transaction costs and reduce friction during the negotiating process, especially in the seed rounds and early stage financing.
Advantages
- The VIMA documents are designed to be flexible without being overly customisable
- Many VIMA clauses reflect industry norms, taking into account the interests of founders & investors in a balanced and pragmatic fashion. This reduces the number of issues to be resolved. Both parties then focus on negotiating high-level issues & key deal-specific terms.
- VIMA provide general information regarding funding rounds – especially useful to founders & investors entering into such funding rounds for the first time.
Clifford Chance’s Create+65 lab has also made the use of VIMA even easier.
Startups using Singapore law can now use a chatbot or online questionnaire to simplify the drafting process and generate a NDA, Series A Term Sheet, and Shareholders’ Agreement for potential investors.
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Founders & investors should still get legal advice, but the VIMA tools should help both sides accelerate discussions, and reduce cost as they don’t have to start from scratch.
These community-lead efforts have contributed to Singapore’s growing ecosystem of about VC funds & almost 4,000 tech startups, with 59% of Asian regional HQs of multinational tech companies based here [Nikkei Asia, Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB]
My LinkedIn post here.
About Zhilin SIM
Having worked and lived in Singapore, the Nordics, China, Spain, UK, I’m now based in Paris.
I’m fluent in English, French and Mandarin, and I’m learning Arabic because it’s a beautiful and fascinating language.
My team creates and supports one-many initiatives connecting Corporate and Startup ecosystems in Europe to business and innovation opportunities in Singapore and Southeast Asia.
I’m passionate about horticulture, watercolour, startups/tech as well as French cuisine, Peranakan kueh techniques and other global cuisines.
Feel free to connect with me if you think my network in Europe and Asia could be of benefit to your business and innovation activities.
