We’re building a marketspace where people buy, sell and discover the joys of authentic hand-crafted (i.e., not mass produced) food and lifestyle experiences.

To serially start up, scale and sustain transcendent ventures, we need the kind of capital that’s willing and able to come in early, make decisive bets on founders, and commit capacity, network and resources to back them all the way to transcendence.

The Y Groupe invests in seed stage opportunities and follow-on capital requirements. We also work with investors and corporate venturing groups to develop and fund private equity and strategic investment opportunities, including startup, buyout, special purpose and roll-up vehicles.

Unique to The Y Groupe is COI. The Customer Ownership Initiative is our proprietary platform for evaluating and managing private equity investments as a portfolio of customer segments, the key lever being to maximize customer lifetime value: to own the customer. With COI, we can build and invest beyond the traditional confines of industry and sector. Our allegiance is to high-value customers, we follow them and build trusted relationships across sectors. Thus, we are more interested in building portfolio around mothers, diabetics, or migrant workers than in defining investments around sectors like retail, healthcare, banking, technology, gaming, video, mobile, etc.

Born in the USA and growing up in Asia, the Center for University-Based Enterprise & Development builds and invests in startup hubs and venture accelerators dedicated to creating collaborative, geo-concentrated corridors of innovation among faculty, alumni, students and the broader communities encompassed by leading universities, including private corporations and investors.

The CUBED mission is to democratize entrepreneurship – through universities, to reach out to people from all walks and offer entrepreneurship as a viable career choice, one that feeds passion and purpose, builds on one’s talents, and affords a life of one’s choosing. And yes: makes the world a better place.

CUBED started in New Haven, Connecticut as CUBED@UNH, hosted by the University of New Haven and located strategically between Boston and New York City. CUBED’s current development is 1.4 K-COR, in the Katipunan Corridor of Quezon City, straddling 1.4 kilometers between 2 of Asia’s finest universities, Ateneo de Manila University and the University of the Philippines.

K-COR is the Katipunan Corridor, 1.4 kilometers the distance bridging the Ateneo and the University of the Philippines, two of Asia’s finest universities, both located in Katipunan.

K-COR is not a top-down, government or big company chartered development; not even an Ateneo or UP mandate, although we have many and deep collaborations with both schools, as with government and the private sector.

K-COR is a movement for, with, by entrepreneurs, technologists, designers, scholars and thinkers, the creative forces that make Katipunan a singular hotbed for startups and game-changers. Unlike other venture hubs, K-COR isn’t just place or program. K-COR’s driving force is culture, Katipunan is our way of life. We don’t just work here; many of us live here, our friends are here, we spent the happiest, most formative years of our lives here. In Ateneo, in UP, in Miriam our highest ideals and best ideas were born. This is where we learned to get things done, to excel, to work as teams, to fight and never give up. Loyalty and friendship were nurtured here, and service. We love Katipunan for better and for worse. We choose to stay here and many more of us are coming back or moving in, in many cases after advanced degrees and careers in the US and Europe – calling Katipunan home and base for building the future.

We see it as a collective future, our whole greater than our sum of parts. Thus, on the development side, K-COR’s role is to enable the synergies that serially spawn game-changers.

First, to foster encounters and exchanges – on and off campus, in office spaces, in cafes and restaurants; regular encounters and exchanges with daily, weekly, monthly venues and formats.

Second, to channel those synergies towards focused areas of innovation and disruption – not into silos, but into interdisciplinary clusters where K-COR’s base enjoys natural advantages. Example: OpenTV, a disruption platform for turning text-heavy IP into video-rich cloud and mobile content offerings.

Third, to support the synergies with capital and other resources needed to turn game-changing ideas into game-changing products and game-changing companies.