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Source: Cais
CAIS, the leading alternative investment platform, today announced a $225 million round of funding led by Apollo (NYSE: APO) and Motive Partners (“Motive”), with additional investment from Franklin Templeton (NYSE: BEN), which values CAIS at more than $1 billion.
This new investment follows a previous investment by Eldridge and accelerates CAIS’s mission to modernize how financial advisors access alternative investments. Blythe Masters, Founding Partner of Motive, and Andrew Gosden, Managing Director in Financial Services & Strategy at Apollo, will join CAIS’s board of directors.
“We are honored to have Apollo, Motive, and Franklin Templeton as our new shareholders and partners,” said Matt Brown, Founder and CEO of CAIS. “This investment advances the critical role CAIS plays in revolutionizing how the alternative investment and wealth management communities engage, learn, and transact.”
Alternative assets are expected to make up to 24% of the global investable market by 2025, according to the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst Association, up from 12% in 2018. CAIS has doubled its headcount in the last year to meet demand, as transaction volume has increased by 65 percent year-over-year with the number of platform users increasing by 60 percent. Building on that momentum, CAIS will use the proceeds of this financing round to fuel further advancements in technology, enhance the customer experience, invest in the digitization of product operations and processes, and explore strategic opportunities.
“We are excited to invest in CAIS, one of the fintech leaders transforming alternative investment access for wealth management. At Apollo, we want more individuals to access alternative strategies and companies like CAIS help to bridge the gap between asset managers and advisors through their growing platform. We believe this latest funding round will support the Company’s continued growth and success,” said Marc Rowan, Co-Founder and CEO of Apollo.
“CAIS has built a unique marketplace for alternatives through a commitment to excellent service and education. This investment will turbo-charge the technology transformation of the business towards a modular, flexible cloud-based architecture, which will modernize the way investors gain access to this asset class, allowing managers, investors, and their advisors to focus less on process and more on value-added interactions,” said Blythe Masters, Founding Partner at Motive.
CAIS serves the independent wealth management community, which has been historically under-allocated to alternatives when compared with large national broker-dealers or institutional investors, whether due to complexity, higher minimums, and fees, need for education, or other barriers to entry. As the first truly open marketplace for alternative investments, where financial advisors and asset managers can engage and transact at scale, CAIS seeks to remove these barriers, enabling advisors to enhance outcomes for their investors and providing managers with centralized access to a highly fragmented wealth management community.
“We believe that individual investors should have access to the same alternative investment solutions as large institutions, and CAIS is doing just that through its innovative and user-friendly platform,” said Jenny Johnson, President and CEO of Franklin Templeton. “CAIS shares our goal of making it easier for advisors and individual investors to diversify into alternatives to meet their investment objectives.”
Financial Technology Partners served as financial advisor to CAIS on the transaction.
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