We’re building Checksome to help angel investors, investment DAOs, and funds gain better insight and transparency into their portfolio. Our vision is to empower the investor community with tools to create a more collaborative, efficient, and engaging investing experience.
THE CHECKSOME VISION
The funding of tech innovation reached a renewed apex in 2021: Venture investors deployed a record $182.4 billion across 784 deals globally. This explosive growth in allocation to risk capital underlies an emerging trend: Angel investors have become a larger source of funding than ever before. Early-stage check writers invested over $11B in the first 9 months of 2021, driven primarily by three levers:
- Individuals and solo capitalists are investing almost venture-sized checks into pre-seed and seed deals, while rounds only marginally increased in size in the last 12 months.
- The number of angel investors has grown due to more individuals reaching accredited investor status.
- Angel investing has increasingly become a viable and exciting investment category for individuals looking for uncorrelated returns.
If we couple these tailwinds with the vigorous growth in new business starts in the United States, we expect that there will be more dollars looking for early stage investing opportunities - which in turn will cause angel investments to consist of a larger percentage of the modern investor’s portfolio.
The more obvious and well-documented trend of 2021 is the proliferation of individual and institutional investment in digital assets. This remarkable year can be summarized in a few headlines:
- Nearly half of millennial millionaires surveyed by CNBC disclosed that they have at least 25% of their wealth in cryptocurrencies.
- Centralized crypto exchanges supported over $14 trillion in volume, whereas decentralized exchange (DEX) volume eclipsed $1 trillion in 2021.
- Venture capital deployed $30 billion, or 16.4% of all global VC investment, into crypto in 2021.
- The market for NFTs generated over $23 billion in volume in 2021, which is an incredible feat when you consider that most traders of NFTs started trading just this year.
So what does this all mean? Understanding that today’s investor is likely to have a greater exposure to risk capital such as early stage start-ups and digital assets than ever before, the continued maturity of Web2 and global adoption of Web3 economies will drive the next generation of investors to allocate markedly larger positions to these asset types as compared to prior generations. We believe that these secular trends will create new required processes for investor portfolios where few viable solutions currently exist.
UNMET NEEDS OF THE MODERN INVESTOR
At Checksome, we understand that the forward thinking investor pursues exposure to both Web2 and Web3 projects with increasing comfort and versatility. This river jumping between these diametrically opposing paradigms of investment in technological revolutions creates a complex set of unmet needs.
- We lack an accurate way to track venture and token investment portfolios in a cohesive, easy to use format. Much of this is done via traditional tools such as Notion, Google Docs, Excel, and other tools that do not talk to each other and lack the ability to integrate data meaningfully to tell an investor the story of their portfolio, similar to what you would expect from a tradfi PFM.
- The modern investor lacks a way to monitor and track a deal pipeline of prospective opportunities across angel and crypto asset classes, which creates challenges with workflows, conducting diligence, and reporting. We’ve seen a tremendous interest from investors to collaborate with others within their IRL and social networks to share insights and dealflow.
- Web3 token holders do not get a portfolio level view of token investments, including proposals, vesting schedules and real time pricing updates, and have fragmented options when it comes to on-chain interaction with their holdings.
THE MESSY LANDSCAPE
There are currently a myriad of tools and SaaS platforms trying to solve for the preceding challenges. Still, individual angel investors, investment DAOs, and smaller funds lack adequate tooling that is available to larger, institutional investors.
ENTER CHECKSOME
Checksome was initially created out of need to manage personal pre- and post- investment processes by a team with years of experience investing in both early stage equity and tokens. The choices in both design and functionality were very intentional and inspired by the desire to easily gain better insight and transparency into the portfolio.
After building out the initial layout, we met nearly 75 angels, investment DAO participants, and smaller fund managers to learn more about how they manage investments across venture and digital asset classes. Our surveys and interviews yield a clear conclusion: A new solution must exist to help investors manage deal flow, diligence, and post-investment processes.
Our vision is to empower the investor community with the tools to create a more collaborative, efficient, and engaging angel and token investing experience. The Checksome platform will provide a differentiated experience to enable its users to track web2 and web3 deal flow and navigate all the intricacies of managing not only equity investments, but also multi-chain token investments, including vesting, staking, delegating, derivatives, and more.
JOIN US
Our team is excited to share more perspectives and insights into what we are building over the coming weeks. If this resonates, we invite you to join the waitlist and follow the Checksome twitter to be one of the first to join our community of next generation investors. Onwards!