Announcing Allocate’s $5MM seed round!

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.

I’m thrilled to announce the close of our $5MM seed round from a fantastic mix of institutional investors and strategic angels. We are fortunate to have backers such as Tusk Ventures, Urban Innovation Fund, Fika Ventures, Basis Set Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures, Monochrome Ventures, Broadhaven Ventures, Rarebreed Ventures, Ulu, Supernode Ventures, Switch Ventures, and Unshackled Ventures (and many other incredible angels).

We’re also excited to bring on great advisors such as long-time fund investor Judith Elsea from Weathergage and Artivest (acquired by iCapital)founder James Waldinger.

Linked here is the press release here for more details as well as the TechCrunch article. We’re excited about how this fresh capital will allow us to continue to realize our vision of building a complete turnkey experience geared to eliminate the friction points for Limited Partners (and GP’s) that prevent venture capital from truly being an accessible and efficient asset category.

As I’ve previously discussed, we have some fundamental beliefs that have inspired the start of Allocate.

• Venture Capital — effectively a long-term bet on the innovation ecosystem — will continue to provide excellent risk-adjusted returns for investors, particularly for funds in the top 1–2 quartiles.
• Venture Capital will continue to evolve toward further decentralization, with managers of all types and sizes acting as essential funding sources for entrepreneurs. Many of the best firms of tomorrow are still in the early days of being formed, and these managers will be significantly more diverse in terms of background, focus, region, ethnicity, and gender.
• The influence that retail capital will have on funding private alternative assets is still in the very early innings. The combination of a historic amount of generational wealth transfer and the mainstreaming of alternative investments will shape wealth allocation strategies in the coming decades.

Why did we raise capital?

After spending a decade sitting in the intersection of fund managers and limited partners, we continually observed consistent points of friction that have made the supply and demand side of the private fund marketplace inefficient, opaque, and limiting.

Notably, we saw several primary friction points on the investor side:

• A real need for education, which is common for idiosyncratic industries such as venture capital.
• Efficient discovery of suitable investments that are relevant to the investors various mandates and investment objectives.
• The ability to accurately diligence and assess managers when data points are so limited and when so few family offices and wealth advisers have full staffing necessary for quantitative and qualitative diligence.
• Access to the best funds, which includes overcoming minimum check size hurdles and forming relationships with underlying managers.
• Ease of investing and tracking private fund investments. While technology is improving the experience of investing in privates, we are still in the early stages of truly streamlining execution of investments.

We also observed that the degree and depth of these friction points were a function of the type of investor (e.g., wealth advisors have different challenges as institutions or family offices).

Our mission from the start has been to create a more efficient and inclusive capital ecosystem, and we decided to develop a comprehensive solution that would address these primary friction points. To accomplish this, we knew software would play a leading role and would serve as the true catalyst for unlocking responsible and informed venture investing.

To hear a bit about our initial product, check out www.allocate.co and join the waitlist of over 1,000 investors already signed up for our upcoming beta release in the coming months. We look forward to updating you further soon!