Circle Acquires Equity Crowdfunding Platform Seedinvest
Circle is a peer-to-peer payments technology company which was founded by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville in October 2013. Circle’s mobile payment platform, Circle Pay, allows users to hold, send, and receive traditional fiat currencies, and it had in February 2018, purchased Poloneix, a cryptocurrency exchange. Circle also operates an OTC cryptocurrency desk and the Circle Invest application. As per reports that have now closed its acquisition of equity crowdfunding platform SeedInvest. The deal with was initially announced back in October has now received has now received approval from self-regulatory body FINRA.
With a $500 minimum investment, SeedInvest will expand access to startup investing, which is the usual scenario is restricted to people and entities who have access to greater capital. The company says that they have an elaborate vetting process as a result of which only around 1% of the startups that apply for funding eventually get accepted. It now so stands that the company which boasts of 260000 users, has spent more than 100 USD across more than 150 startups through SeedInvest’s services.
Circle believes that the acquisition of SeedInvest will prove to be a major help in efforts towards the tokenization of financial assets. However, in spite of the acquisition, SeedInvest will continue to function normally for the time being, exploring asset tokenization as a possible option.
Sean Neville and Jeremy Allaire, the co-founders of Circle have been extremely optimistic about blockchain technology’s potential to drive asset tokenization. They said,
“We believe that the tokenization of financial assets will ultimately unlock capital for growing companies and investment opportunities for people everywhere. Over time, more functions of private equity will be tokenized — including voting and governance, dividend payouts, and other economic features.”
Though the terms of the deal have not been released, the co-founders of SeedInvest, Ryan Feit and James Han say that the entire SeedInvest team including themselves are joining Circle. The two also mentioned tokenization and said that it could enable greater liquidity and easier flow of capital across borders when it comes to startup investing.