Perspectives on our investment in Upvest
At Partech, we strongly believe in the recalibration of the traditional, centralized banking system into a more decentralized, blockchain-based future. This future will bring an increased share of tokenized assets which will be held privately, reducing the need for large and expensive custody banks. Upvest is advancing to be the European market leader with their innovative non-custodial stack that raised eyebrows far beyond Europe.
We have been following Upvest for some time, as they are working with one of our portfolio companies, Exporo. The market-leading platform that democratizes access to real estate investments. In the use case of Exporo, Upvest contributes greatly to their positioning, as Upvest’s technology reduces transaction costs by ca. 80% vs. traditional structures. This allows a much broader audience to participate in this attractive investment market, even with less personal capital available.
What makes Upvest so intriguing? Upvest convinced us with their super easy, Dev-targeted set of APIs that makes it extremely smooth for their customers to implement blockchain-based applications at low cost. Their stack integrates seamlessly into their clients’ products and ensures optimum user experience.
While benefiting from all the upsides of using the blockchain, their customers don't need to worry about the complication that comes with it: the threat of losing private keys, compensating protocols and creating wallets. Upvest caters to all of that in the background and even works blockchain-agnostic. We are sure this should make them choice number one for every developer thinking about a block-chain integration.
Moreover, founder and CEO Martin Kassing built a remarkable and highly motivated team around him. They displayed great agility in the past and certainly combine a very valuable and super relevant set of skills and experiences, both in Fintech and Crypto. Being one of the few revenue-generating business models in the crypto-valley Berlin, Upvest’s product/market fit is being proven by more than 20 active customers.
We can only congratulate the team on what they have achieved so far and we are extremely proud to be participating in this 7 Mio. € Series A and the journey ahead. We are confident that Upvest will have a significant contribution in facilitating the tokenization of assets, reducing transaction costs and, therefore, creating more equality in financial markets.
All the best for 2020!
P.S.: In case you’re lost in translation:
