Sheldon Inwentash Discusses ThreeD Capital Focus on Mining, Blockchain
A May 2021 Motley Fool article identified “3 Unstoppable Growth Trends to Invest in Today.”
Those trends were the fintech market, artificial intelligence, and virtual and augmented reality, all emerging industries based on disruptive technology, and all buoyed by the use of crypto-currencies.
They are also all industries that Canadian company ThreeD Capital Inc.(CSE:IDK / OTCQB:IDKFF) has chosen to invest heavily in, along with blockchain technology.
The company’s founder, Sheldon Inwentash, made his name through early-stage investments in the mining industry, primarily by focusing on mining companies using disruptive technologies to create value where few others saw potential.
The focus on disruptive technologies helped make Inwentash a well-known Canadian investor.
In the junior resources space, Inwentash built up shareholder value through investments in Queenston Mining, sold to Osisko Mining Corp. for $550 million, Aurelian Resources, sold to Kinross for $1.2 billion, and Gold Eagle Mines, sold to Goldcorp for $1.5 billion.
Inwentash made those deals while leading Pinetree Capital, a merchant banking firm based in Toronto.
Now, at ThreeD Capital, Sheldon Inwentash has brought the same focus on disruptive technologies, but with an eye for any industry with promising new technologies — not just mining.
Inwentash said he searches for big-picture changes across all kinds of industries. He said he wants to invest in companies that aren’t yet on the front page of Forbes magazine, whether those companies are in the mining space, or augmented reality.
He’s bringing that sensibility to technology by investing in all of the “unstoppable” growth trends mentioned by The Motley Fool.
While much of the media continues to focus on the digitalization caused by the pandemic, Inwentash said the technology currently revolutionizing nearly every industry, from online shopping to mining to finance, was always going to happen — if not quite as quickly without quarantines nearly everywhere in the world.
“Whether it’s through a ZOOM call or shifting your business to eCommerce, my feeling is that we are in the midst of a digital acceleration, and this way of life will be with us indefinitely,” Inwentash said in an interview with Finsmes.com.
In February, ThreeD Capital invested $375,000 in Intellabridge Technology Corporation (“Intellabridge”), a blockchain technology company focused on developing decentralized finance technology solutions.
Inwentash, who said that DeFi, or decentralized finance, is an innovation poised to revolutionize the financial industry, also joined the company’s board of directors.
“DeFi technologies provide peer-to-peer financial transactions without a middle entity such as a bank,” Inwentash said in the press release.
“Blockchains allow this to be done in a transparent and trustless manner. Intellabridge is simplifying the process by which the average person can get exposure to DeFi and the high interest rates accompanied in yield finance to protect individuals against purchasing power erosion by inflation. Our investment in Intellabridge perfectly aligns with our vertical of and belief in blockchain and other decentralized technologies.”
ThreeD Capital has also made inroads into eSports and AR (augmented reality) with a $300,000 investment in ePlay Digital Inc., a company developing augmented reality games for both eSports and normal sports. Inwentash also signed on as an advisor to ePlay.
It’s not the company’s first foray into AR. ThreeD has also invested in ImagineAR, where Inwentash also joined the company’s Board of Directors in 2019.
ThreeD Capital will remain focused on these companies and others that promote technologies “that change the way we do things or are different from what we’ve done before,” Inwentash said.
Inwentash and ThreeD Capital are based in Toronto, which he said is already a global leader in the blockchain space, even if much of the rest of the world hasn’t caught on to that fact.
“The only thing that’s missing is capital, but there’s a lot of that in Toronto, as well, so there are opportunities everywhere,” Inwentash said. “Arguably, Toronto doesn’t have to be a Silicon Valley of the north, but it does have its fair share of companies that are spawned here.”