These days, individual investors have a wide range of options for investing in startups without actually having to deal with them. This ecosystem more or less started with AngelList, but now there are a number of options that startups can use to raise capital and investors can deploy to manage their deals, including Carta, Allocations, Vauban, and Odin. .
A new player in this space, Quorum, founded by two Ukrainians, is poised to expand its own approach to the scheme.
The startup, which helps startups raise both equity and debt, has acquired Investory.io, a smaller Vienna-based company in the sector. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but with the acquisition, Quoroom counts more than 30 funds and angel investor groups as clients, and approximately 1,000 companies will use its infrastructure to manage and update their cap tables. It turns out.
Prior to this acquisition, Investory had raised just $1.5 million in venture funding, most of which came from accelerator Startup Wise Guys. Qualroom has announced that it will retire the acquired platform within the next year.
As the venture ecosystem grows, investment management has become increasingly fragmented and complex. Syndicates and funds in particular must contend with fragmented tools, high legal fees, regulatory complexity, time-consuming portfolio management, and limited access to fresh capital. , new members and LP.
This does not go into the complexities of setting up a special purpose vehicle (SPV) and complying with the regulations surrounding it, or even the lack of maneuverability and flexibility when it comes to transferring funds.
Quoroom seeks to solve these problems by consolidating trade management, compliance, legal documentation, portfolio monitoring, investor relations, and exit distribution into a single platform.
“The key differentiator is that we can simplify the entire funding process,” said Uliana Štibel, co-founder and CEO of the company. “We have advanced tools such as data rooms, investor CRMs, soft commitment forms, legal documents, and e-signature capabilities. Our payment reconciliation system reduces deadlines from four weeks to just one week. It has been shortened,” she added.
The company started in 2020 as a legal tech platform for managing angel deals and has since expanded to service syndicated deals. Founders using Quoroom now incorporate legal documents such as SAFEs, ASAs and convertible note agreements into their investment flows, and for VC funds, the platform automates LLP agreements and also covers KYC and AML checks. Masu. It also manages the SPV created for each transaction.
Quoroom said it uses FCA-regulated entities to facilitate transactions, but payments can also be made through customers' bank accounts.
There are certainly plenty of other players in this space.
Cap table management platform Carta is its closest competitor considering its range of services and infrastructure, but it has made some noise recently.
Bunch, who lives in Berlin, raised $15.5 million in a Series A round in July and claims private funds currently manage around €2 billion worth of assets through its platform. However, this company is aimed at large venture investors.
Other solutions for investors include Odin (UK), which allows investors to pool their funds to back startups and VC funds. The company has been suspended after being told by Britain's financial regulator, the FCA, to clean up its compliance operations.
Also available are Sydecar (US), AngelList (US), Allocations (US), Fundrbird, TotemVC, Vestberry (EU), Visible.vc (US), and Rundit (EU).
Shtybel previously operated a fintech incubation program in partnership with Mastercard, OTP Bank, and National Bank of Ukraine. She is also the co-founder of Enkidu, a platform that has raised over $3.5 million for projects in Ukraine since 2022. Her co-founder and CTO, Denys Goncharenko, has 10 years of experience in software engineering.
Platforms like Quoroom are moving towards an open door. By 2030, Millennials are expected to inherit a total of between $30 trillion and $68 trillion (some estimates put it as high as $140 trillion).
This means more funds are likely to move into venture capital and impact-focused investing, and funds may be allocated on a deal-by-deal basis as younger investors enter investing. Many of them will be very familiar with using online platforms to do so.