Better late than never
October 11, 2022
It's been a good week on the Series B front. As the final docs were signed and we began to take in wires, we also had several new commitments come through as well. These commitments were years in the making, with both dating back to 2019 when they first diligenced us.
The first fund has partners that all come from traditional finance. They saw us initially when we were touting ourselves as being able to power the future of digital assets for private credit markets, which we pivoted from shortly thereafter. They looked at us again when we envisioned a future where we would be the Bloomberg for private credit markets and yet all we had to share was a crowdfunding platform and a half-baked Bloomberg App Portal web application. And now finally, when we have all three sides of the platform working in unison, they see a picture clearly that aligns so well with the world they know in traditional finance and recognize just how powerful a platform like ours can be. Even though they're investing still in the vision and the future of the company, it's one that they can see coming to life before their eyes. My conversation with them on Friday echoed these sentiments exactly as they believed we had first mover advantage and yet having that advantage does not come easily or quickly, it takes years to focus and build to the point where that advantage can be pressed and capitalized upon.
The second fund is actually a crypto fund who also has partners with specifically capital markets experience. It was interesting to observe but as I was helping [ ] with their fundraise, I noticed that all the crypto VCs gravitated towards what we did vs. traditional VCs have such a hard time grasping our market. Digging in a bit deeper and I realized that all the traditional VCs who had capital markets experience all left to start or join crypto VCs as it was a greenfield opportunity to take everything they knew and push it to a new frontier. This left traditional VCs with little to no capital markets or finance experience to speak of, leading to all these investments you see in robo advisors (Betterment), consumer brokerages (Robinhood, Titan), as they just don't understand what goes on in an entirely other side of the market. When this fund first looked at us in 2019, it piqued their interest because as a crypto fund the security token angle was right up their alley. At the time though, they just did not have a strong thesis one way or another around security tokens as they wanted to see it play out first. Good call on their part as the concept of security tokens fizzled out as quickly as it came. Then when our Series A came along as the bull market for fundraising was in full swing, they wanted to invest and had done very little diligence but we had no room left at all as we were oversubscribed. Fast forward to the past few weeks, the crypto winter has forced them to rethink what and where to allocate capital and so they reached out again as they heard we were raising. I gave them the rundown of what we do and how far we've come as we're a long ways away from where we were in 2019. They were incredibly impressed by the platform, the traction, and the realization of a vision that they so clearly understand and can relate to.
Three years on and dozens of due diligence calls later, I'm thrilled to have both of these new investors on board. Everyone is realizing it now, this is the round to come in on - all the things we've said we were going to do are now starting to make sense and they want in on this journey with us 🏞
