The team of Dunhill Ventures: Jonathan Barry, Natalie Torin, Ambra Berselli and Piers Dunhill
Family Offices Can Join Dunhill’s Exclusive Club
EXCLUSIVE
FAMILY OFFICES, the conduit through which ultra-wealthy individuals, invest their funds, has a strong connection with Monaco.
One of the biggest players in the area of family offices is Dunhill Ventures, who had a major presence at the Principality’s Formula One Grand Prix earlier this year as well as at the iconic Monaco Yacht Show for the past two years.
Dunhill Ventures hosts red-carpet events during these highlights of the Monaco season, acting as an exclusive membership club for ultra-high net-worth individuals around the world.
The Dunhill “club,” better known as the Dunhill Family Office Network, offers strategic partnerships, collaborative forums, innovation hubs and exclusive members’ events through its network.
Natalie Torin, managing director of the company, tells Monaco Voice: “Barely a week goes by without news of a major innovation that could benefit mankind. Our thought leadership forums are designed to provide a voice for the architects of these innovations and for family offices to share trends on where they are choosing to allocate capital.
“We hear consistently from family offices that their first priority is naturally wealth preservation but once this has been achieved, they like to invest their capital where it will do the most good.
“For this reason, we are seeing family offices share their preference for deploying into sustainability and healthcare – such as technologies built to cure and manage cancer, dementia or diabetes – or environmental breakthroughs built to meet the 2030 UN sustainable development goals.
“Monaco is a key destination for our events. Not only do we have personal ties here but many family offices in our local network are open to looking at the kind of impact investments we seek to champion.”
In addition to wooing investors in Monaco, Dunhill Ventures has had a presence at key events worldwide.
In fact, during the past year alone, Dunhill has hosted over fifty private roundtable forums as well as larger impact conferences in Davos for the World Economic Forum, Lagos for International Women’s Day, Dubai for Cop28, Singapore Formula One Grand Prix, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabi at LEAP and at the Cannes Film Festival.
Dubai-based Ambra Berselli, the company’s investment director, says: “We have expanded rapidly over the past two years and have created a forum for investors and innovators to connect in a win-win way so they can make an impact in their field as they expand to new markets.
She dismisses any idea of the impactful tech investors coming only from ‘hot spots’ like Silicon Valley: “It's win-win for the companies seeking strategic partners in new regions and the investors who join the events looking both to diversify their portfolios into markets abroad and to attract new businesses to their regions which will of course create jobs.
“Companies expanding internationally come to us because what we offer is truly global. A company seeking strategic partnerships abroad will come to us to connect with the same family office, institution or individual allocator in terms of the assets under management (AUM) whether they are in London, Lagos or Los Angeles.”
Dunhill Ventures is chaired by its founder Piers Dunhill, who set up the business to capitalise on his network of high-level contacts to promote causes he cares about, at the same time recognising that successive banking crises have forced many companies and corporations to look elsewhere for funding.
In doing so, he is following in the entrepreneurial footsteps of great-great grandfather Alfred Dunhill, who inherited his family business at 21 and expanded it by focusing on the needs of smokers and the then new breed of motoring enthusiasts. Loyal customers and advocates included legendary names from the world of literature, Rudyard Kipling and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
“We look at impactful disruptive healthcare projects ranging from pharma to diagnostics, and remote patient monitoring platform technologies to medical devices,” says the chairman.
“But the same intent is crossing over to other sectors, like real estate projects that include affordable housing in the proposition."
Jonathan Barry, Dunhill Director of International Development, adds: “Logistics is another field we continue to track, whether it be for emerging markets struggling to move goods from A to B, getting vital medical supplies to end users, driving down the environmental cost of shipping goods, or localizing manufacturing operations so they don’t need to move goods across vast distances.”
Dunhill is continuing to expand its base of family offices globally through its invitation-only membership club.
Find out how Dunhill can help you expand your partnership base abroad by contacting: pa@dunhillventures.io