Digitising $700m of African Assets
A simple way to manage digital assets, shares and debt.
By: Marvin H. Coleby and Eugene Mutai
In the past, tracking changes in shareholders and managing your venture’s next round of financing was painful.
In a world where companies are on the verge of building autonomous self-driving vehicles and run complex A.I. proprietary algorithms, many of them still manage their companies and funds with paper and spreadsheets.
We’ve all navigated a maze of random excel sheets to track our shareholders and limited partners’ ownership. None of us look forward to endless searches for hard-to-find documents through our email, desktop and Google Drive (for the savviest of savvy) for our investors or contractors.
Raising funds for your next venture, tracking changes in shareholders ownership or transferring real estate are complicated processes. It’s time to simplify them — we’re out to create that future. It’s time.
African technology companies raised nearly $700 million in funding through 2018 — representing double digit growth since 2016. There is a need for digital infrastructure to simplify those transactions with digital shares and accurate cap tables for investors and their companies.
Today we’re excited to announce the opening of our alpha version to the public as we move towards beta. Raise is a software as a service tool for funds, companies and law firms to securely digitise share certificates, partnership units, and real estate assets. Our blockchain-based platform creates customised digital securities that can be programmed with your own data, key performance indicators, and shareholder or partnership information. The software is built to simplify company ownership or real estate with the power of assets, data, and documents in one secure place. A familiar alias is given to these compliant programmable digital securities — security tokens.
Data for Ownership and Performance
Raise allows you to easily visualise customised data on performance and share ownership. Data is key to accurately track ownership, value assets, and review portfolio performance. Most of us still struggle to understand how a capitalisation table works or how to value companies. We need data to optimise return on investments and to chart consistent growth. Too little of us use data-driven approaches to understand our ownership and growth. Too many of our companies and investors suffer from inconsistent capitalisation tables in disconnected excel sheets. We’ve all miscalculated term sheets and convertible notes. Time to level up.
Asset Security on the Blockchain
We take security seriously. The good news is that your share and real estate investment certificates and are all assets you own — cherish them. That ownership is ultimately represented by a single, original, document. The bad news is that if you lose that original version, you could lose ownership of your fund, company or home (unless you’re brave enough to petition the government for a new copy). It may cost you a lot too, time and money wise, if you find out the details are inaccurate too. There’s a better way: a single and incorruptible version of your asset.
Our platform is built with blockchain technology, and each asset and share on the platform is represented as a ‘security token’. Security tokens, or digital securities, are digital representations of your asset in a highly secure database that is maintained by blockchain technologies. In other words, your share certificate could be safer, than it currently is as an attachment to a 2-year-old email from your law firm, buried under thousands of newsletters, expired product offers and cat memes. Never lose it again, and maintain accurate, clear and trackable ownership over your assets. You worked hard for them, it’s time to protect them.
Security tokens are also revolutionising traditional finance — they allow us to securely move, sell and transact assets seamlessly across borders. Seamless cross-border financing is important to re-build economies with lacking financial infrastructure. Our goal is to use security tokens to create more accessible and liquid capital markets in frontier markets. Compliance and security are at the centre of this mission, and that’s why we’re partnering with a network of 16 corporate law firms to create a regulatory framework for blockchain-based assets to create a more secure platform for our community of users.
Raise — our mission
Assets and other securities will move seamlessly across borders — from experienced investment funds to laptops, and to your mobile phone. We’re here to build the digital infrastructure for this next generation of securities — so that one day anyone, anywhere, can invest and create their own economic independence. Safely distributing opportunity and independence is our core value, blockchain is one of the many powerful tools to get there.
Security tokens and blockchain-based assets are transforming how we think about traditional finance. These tools are making finance and investing more accessible. One day, a Bahamian or Barbadian with the click of a button, will be able to invest in real estate assets on the rapidly growing African continent — and one day, a Nigerian company will be able to securely source and close investment from an investment fund in Beijing. We, Raise, are working to power these possibilities. Make the world a lot smaller than it is now — at least in terms of managing and acquiring financing.
Next Steps and updates
Today we’re excited & proud to announce we’re opening our alpha version to the public for testing at the renown Africa Tech Summit in Kigali, Rwanda. We’re testing it with our customers ahead of a beta launch in a few months with some of our partners, including the Africa Legal Network and an ecosystem of accredited investors, private equity funds and real estate owners across Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. The feedback we get from everyone engaged with us will be most valuable.
We’re moving through a list of feature updates to be launched this year. Stay tuned! We’d love to hear how you’re currently managing your assets, shares, and documents — no matter if you’re an entrepreneur, fund manager, or law firm. Join our mailing list for our beta launch and get early access to the software.
Join our new Telegram channel for more regular updates and to support discussions around security tokens, capital markets, digital asset regulation, and asset management.
Follow us for more!
Twitter: @getraise
Website: www.getraise.io
LinkedIn: http://bit.ly/raiselinkedin
Telegram: http://t.me/getraise
