Crypto Demand Surges on Indiegogo Founder's Alternative Investments Platform

Vincent, a sort of search engine for alternative investing, is fielding a massive demand for crypto as the platform launches out of beta with $2 million in funding.

“Between October and November alone, investors looking for digital assets have grown 80%,” said Slava Rubin, Vincent co-founder and executive chairman. “Considering digital assets today represent less than 10% of the total available deal volume on Vincent, there is significant room to grow and we are just scratching the surface of helping investors gain access to the space.”

Created by the team behind crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, Vincent currently includes regulated crypto deals from Grayscale, Republic and Cadence among its 50 or so investments. Other verticals include real estate, venture capital, private equity, debt, art and collectibles. More crypto, such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), will be added soon, according to Rubin.

To date, more than 100,000 investment searches have been conducted by 15,000 unique investors, Rubin said.

“We’re in touch with a few larger crypto investment platforms to add their deals into our search engine,” he said. “For us, we do want to vet each platform we work with to ensure compliance and trust, so it takes a bit longer with an asset class as new as crypto.”

Vincent is the brainchild of Indiegogo founder Rubin and former Indiegogo investing lead Evan Cohen. They are joined by fintech entrepreneur Eric Cantor and technology lead Ross Cohen, former head of engineering at Mirror, the hardware firm that sold to Lululemon for $500 million earlier this year.

Vincent’s funding

Investors in the $2 million round include Uncommon Denominator, Rubin’s own Humbition, ERA and The Fund, as well as several strategic angels including Jeff Fagnan (Accomplice, AngelList), Alap Shah (Sentieo) and Lazslo Bock (Google, Humu).

Vincent users are asked to self-qualify as accredited investors where necessary and explain how they are verified, said Rubin. Thereafter the actual transactions are happening on the partner platforms, which perform their own know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) checks.

Rubin said the average Vincent user is looking at about 25 deals and comparing multiple asset classes, rather than focusing on any one area.

“This gives you a broader understanding of the landscape,” Rubin said. “If you want to get totally committed to one thing then great. We think the way this market is going to become much bigger is to make it easier for people to discover and analyze alternatives.”