Sydecar is on a mission to bring more efficiency to private markets by standardizing how investment vehicles are created, executed, and managed. By doing so, we will enable thousands of new investors to launch investment vehicles instantaneously, track funding in real-time, and offer hassle-free opportunities for early liquidity. We exist to serve the most passionate and creative individuals as they fund and support world-changing companies.

But we’re not naive enough to believe that we can transform private markets solely by supporting the deal leads, fund managers, and investors who touch our platform directly. We know that transformation of this scale requires that we meet individual investors where they are: in marketplaces, community platforms, communication tools, and banks. All of these businesses – and more importantly, their customers – seek better technology to access the tremendous opportunity that exists within private markets. 

“The old and labor-intensive processes built around 30-year tech stacks [...] will not scale to 100,000+ financial advisers and millions of accredited investors. What’s more, the user experience is so bad, you would not want to scale it: PDFs, manual bank wires and clunky investor portals are the current “state of the art” here."

— Techcrunch, September 2022*

Today, we’re taking a significant step towards our goal of becoming the standard infrastructure for private market transactions. We’re excited to announce our partnership with Stonks, the official home for startup demo days. By integrating with Sydecar’s deal execution platform, Stonks aims to create the world’s fastest checkout flow to invest in startups. This flow allows investors to sign docs, connect their bank account via Plaid, and fund their investment — all in less than 3 minutes. 

“It’s like Stripe Express Checkout for Startup Investing.”

Soon after launching their Demo Day platform, Stonks realized the most powerful aspect of these events was their ability to generate real-time investor excitement about new companies. They saw thousands of angel investors flock to their platform, eager to find the next unicorn. The Stonks team was confident that they would be able to harness that excitement to fund more promising startups (while limiting friction for founders) by facilitating investments through SPVs. The only problem? SPVs can historically take days (or weeks) to create, and there’s quite a bit of friction involved in funneling investors through the signing and funding process. Stonks knew that, in order to fulfill their mission, they needed to create a real-time, low friction “checkout” process for SPVs.

Enter Sydecar. By integrating with Sydecar’s deal execution infrastructure, Stonks can now establish investment entities in real time, onboarding investors, and collect signatures in funds in minutes. Better yet, they’re able to do this all natively within their app, while providing a best-in-class user experience that allows investors to fund immediately while paperwork is handled in the background.

On top of the integration, Stonks has built a number of game-changing features into their Demo Day Vehicle product, including:

• Variable economics by investor, including an early bird discount 

• Shareable, private link for founders to share with their network

• Advanced reporting and analytics for startup accelerators 

  
  

In doing so, they’ve made it easy for any accredited investor to access world class deal flow and removed the headache for early stage founders who are looking to raise from friends, family, and angel investors.
To learn more about Stonks’ new Demo Day Vehicles, check out their recent announcement.

*"The alternative asset class needs new infrastructure — who will build it?" by David Jegen and Abdul Abdirahman. September 14, 2022.