These days, private investors have a range of options to invest in startups without having to deal with them in real life. This ecosystem more or less started with AngelList, but there are now a plethora of options – such as Carta, Allocations, Vauban and Odin – that startups can use to raise funding and investors can use to manage their transactions.
A new player in the space, Quoroom, founded by two Ukrainians, is ready to scale up its own take on the formula.
The startup, which allows startups to raise both equity and debt, has acquired Investory.io, a smaller company in the space based in Vienna. Although the terms of the deal were not disclosed, the acquisition means Quoroom will now count more than 30 funds and angel investors as customers, and has around 1,000 companies using its infrastructure for cap table management and updates.
Investory had only raised $1.5 million in venture funding prior to this acquisition, most of which came from accelerator Startup Wise Guys. Quoroom said it would divest the acquired platform over the next year.
As the venture ecosystem has grown, investment management has become increasingly fragmented and cumbersome—especially for syndicates and funds that must contend with disconnected tools, high legal fees, regulatory complexities, time-consuming portfolio management, and limited access to new capital, new members, and LPs discs.
That’s without even getting into the complexities of setting up special purpose vehicles (SPVs) and complying with the regulations surrounding them, as well as the lack of mobility and flexibility when it comes to money transfers.
Quoroom seeks to solve these problems by integrating deal management, compliance, legal documentation, portfolio monitoring, investor relations and exit distributions into a single platform.
“The key difference is that it simplifies the entire fundraising process,” said the company’s co-founder and CEO, Ulyana Shtybel. “We have advanced tools like data room, investor CRM, soft commitment forms, legal documents and e-signature capabilities. Our payment reconciliation system reduces the closing time from 4 weeks to just 1 week,” she added.
The company started in 2020 as a legal tech platform for managing angel deals and later expanded to service syndicated deals. Today, founders using Quoroom have legal documentation such as SAFEs, ASAs and convertible note agreements incorporated into the investment flow, and for VC funds, the platform automates the LLP agreements, covering KYC and AML checks. It also administers the SPVs created for each deal.
Quoroom said it uses an FCA-regulated entity to facilitate business, but payment can also be made through a customer’s bank account.
Admittedly, there are many other players in the space.
Cap table management platform Carta is the closest competitor in terms of scale of services and infrastructure, although it has had a number of ructions recently.
Bunch, from Berlin, raised $15.5 million in a Series A round in July and claims that private funds currently manage around €2 billion worth of assets through its platform. However, this company is aimed at larger venture capital investors.
Other solutions for investors include Odin (UK), which enables investors to raise money to back startups and VC funds. The company is on a short hiatus after being told by the FCA, the UK’s financial regulator, to sort out its compliance operations.
We also have Sydecar (US), AngelList (US), Allocations (US), Fundrbird, TotemVC, Vestberry (EU), Visible.vc (US) and Rundit (EU).
Shtybel previously ran fintech incubation programs in partnership with Mastercard, OTP Bank and National Bank of Ukraine. She is also the co-founder of Enkidu, a platform that has raised more than $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 push an open door. Millennials are expected to inherit a total of $30 trillion to $68 trillion (some estimates reach $140 trillion) by 2030.
This means more money is likely to move into venture capital and impact investing, where capital is deployed on a deal-by-deal basis as younger investors start investing. Many of them will be very familiar with using online platforms to do so.
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