Advance Venture Partners, the investment affiliate of media group Advance Publications, led a $40m series B round yesterday for Alto Solutions, a US-based retirement investment platform developer which offers options including crypto investing.
Digital currency exchange Coinbase also participated in the round, through corporate venturing arm Coinbase Ventures, alongside Acrew Capital, Alpha Edison, Foundation Capital, Gaingels and Unusual Ventures.
Founded in 2015, Alto runs retirement savings account investing schemes through its alternative assets-focused Alto IRA and cryptocurrency-oriented Alto CryptoIRA subsidiaries, which help some 15,000 users make investments across a range of asset classes including private companies, property and blockchain.
Alto began life after founder and chief executive Eric Satz experienced the complexities of deploying tax-advantaged retirement funds in alternatives first-hand as a retail investor.
The company intends to deploy the series B money to expand its product and engineering teams, increasing headcount from 50 employees to 120 by the end of 2022, Satz told TechCrunch, adding that it will also create investors-focused educational content.
Unusual Ventures had led a $17m series A round for Alto in April 2021, investing alongside Coinbase Ventures, equity management technology provider Carta and insurer New York Life’s corporate venturing arm, New York Life Ventures.
Acrew Capital, Alpha Edison, Franklin Templeton, Moment Ventures and Stone Ridge Holdings Group filled out the participants in the series A round, which boosted its total funding to $30m.
Crypto investment is one of the booming trends among Alto’s customers, but Satz believes interests in work of fine art and non-listed companies are also on the rise. He said in a statement: “I am proud of the success of the Alto team to date and grateful for the continued confidence of many of our core investors in this latest funding round.
“We believe this funding will provide more individuals looking to control their financial future with easy and affordable access to high-growth, diversified, non-traditional asset classes typically reserved for the wealthiest investors, including private equity, venture capital, real estate, securitised artwork and crypto.”
Coinbase is among the most active crypto and blockchain technology providers in the corporate venturing space, joined by the likes of Alameda Research, Animoca Brands and Binance (partly through its Binance Labs subsidiary).
While Coinbase Ventures’ recent investments have included diverse areas such as decentralised finance portfolio tracker DeBank, blockchain-fuelled content distribution technology developer RSS3 and Bridgesplit, the operator of a non-fungible token monetisation platform, Alto remains its only recent foray into self-directed individual retirement accounts (IRAs) for crypto investing.
Digitally securitised alternative investment platform Percent is among Coinbase Ventures’ portfolio companies but the unit has not disclosed when it invested in the company.
Image courtesy of Alto Solutions Inc.
