CAIS, a US-based alternative investment platform, has announced a $225 million round of funding led by Apollo and Motive Partners, with additional investment from Franklin Templeton.
CAIS hits unicorn status with new funding
The latest round puts CAIS in the unicorn club – valuing the platform at more than $1 billion.
Blythe Masters, founding partner of Motive, and Andrew Gosden, managing director in financial services and strategy at Apollo, will join CAIS’s board of directors.
“This investment advances the critical role CAIS plays in revolutionising how the alternative investment and wealth management communities engage, learn, and transact,” comments Matt Brown, founder and CEO of CAIS.
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 says it has doubled its headcount in the last year to meet demand, as transaction volume has increased by 65% year-over-year with the number of platform users increasing by 60%.
CAIS focuses on the independent wealth management community, which, it says, “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”.
CAIS seeks to remove these barriers as “the first truly open marketplace for alternative investments”.
Founded in 2009, CAIS serves 4,400+ advisor firms/teams who oversee more than $2 trillion in network assets. Since inception, it has facilitated over $13.8 billion in transaction volume.
CAIS has offices in New York, Los Angeles, Austin and San Francisco.
