This week we’re incredibly excited to announce our $4.2M seed round led by Seven Seven Six with participation from Greycroft, Elefund, Caffeinated Capital, Plug and Play Tech Center, Witz Ventures, 1Flourish Capital, FinSight Ventures and a network of all-star angel investors. As we embark on this journey to empower a new generation of retail shareholders, we couldn’t do it without the institutional support from some of the strongest early-stage and fintech investors in the industry. We want to give a special thank you to Katelin Holloway and Alexis Ohanian of Seven Seven Six for believing in our vision and providing the best early-stage startup platform imaginable. We’re building enterprise technology so companies can more effectively harness the power of community and it was a critical first step for us to establish our own group of stakeholders that would give us the foundation necessary to delivery something truly unique to the marketplace.
Our focus now turns entirely towards building our technology and servicing our first wave of customers. We will also be traveling to a number of cities and events over the next several months to sit down with potential customers and agency partners. Please let us know if we will be crossing paths and thank you again to all of our founding stakeholders.
March 22 - 23 // NIRI Southeast Conference // Atlanta, GA
March 26 - 29 // Shoptalk // Las Vegas, NV
April 10-14 // Boston, MA + New York, NY
April 24 - 28 // San Francisco, CA + Seattle, WA
May 18 // NIRI SoCal // Irvine, CA
June 6- 8 // NIRI Annual Conference // Chicago, IL
This fintech helping companies engage and build loyalty with retail investors just nabbed funding from Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six (Business Insider - Paywall)
Stakeholder Labs provides plug-in software that verifies a company's shareholders and measures customer behavior with a goal of driving long-term loyalty. The financial-technology company sees untapped potential in the emotional connection between Millennials and Gen Zers and the companies they invest in.
"The hypothesis is that retail investors can be more stable, better advocates, and ultimately better supporters of the brand because often they are not only shareholders but they're also customers and they actually care about the brand," Matt Joanou, CEO and cofounder of Stakeholder Labs, told Insider.
Roundtable presents and contextualizes the data through a dashboard, and Stakeholder Labs helps the business create a campaign to engage with them, such as offering unique rewards to investors like early access to a new product.
Stakeholder Labs Raises $4.2M Seed Round From Seven Seven Six to Help Companies Measure and Increase Retail Investor Engagement (Yahoo!)
Over recent years retail investing has exploded, and according to Reuters, there are now over 100M online brokerage accounts driving up to 32% of total U.S. equity volume. Digitally native retail investors are generating valuable data that is not being captured by issuers and these investors have shown a willingness to share that data if it leads to a more personalized shareholder experience.
"Since joining Reddit in 2016, I’ve had an opportunity to observe retail shareholders emerge as a force in our global financial system and companies are missing the tools necessary to navigate this rapidly changing landscape," said Matt Joanou, Co-Founder and CEO of Stakeholder Labs. "We’re developing an ownership operating system that gives investor relations and marketing professionals the ability to more accurately identify, measure, and manage their most valuable retail shareholders."
"A new generation has discovered investing through platforms like Reddit and they’re demanding software that makes it cheaper, faster, and generally more community oriented," said Alexis Ohanian, Founder of Reddit, Seven Seven Six, and lead investor in Stakeholder Labs. "These retail investors aren’t just looking for financial returns but also deeper emotional connections with the companies they're investing in and an opportunity to express their loyalty in a multitude of ways. We’re incredibly excited about the approach Stakeholder Labs is taking."
"Over the course of my career as a People leader and investor, I’ve had an opportunity to use corporate equity to incentivize employee participation, loyalty, and financial returns," said Katelin Holloway, Founding Partner of Seven Seven Six. "We led Stakeholder Labs’ seed round because we believe there is a huge opportunity to apply the power of equity to incentivize community building and customer action. Alexis and I share the team’s vision for how to approach this challenge."
A Roundup from across Twitter:
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