05 Jun Alternative Investing Startup Wikifolio Raises €6M For International Expansion
Alternative investing startup Wikifolio has closed a €6 million funding round led by European early stage venture fund Speedinvest. The fresh capital will be used by the Austrian company, which I’m told broke-even in the first quarter of 2014, to expand beyond its home country and Germany.
Existing shareholders VHB Ventures (Verlagsgruppe Handelsblatt), Lang & Schwarz, Michael Grabner Media, and Michael Altrichter also participated in the round, along with a number of private investors associated with Speedinvest, among them Jörg Flöck, a former Thomson Reuters executive.
Offering a platform for alternative investing, Wikifolio enables traders to turn their portfolios into fully-fledged financial products, called “wikifolios”, which are then listed on the stock exchange Börse Stuttgart.
The idea being that, through Wikifolio, investors can put their cash into the trading strategies of professional traders via ordering wikifolios through various online brokerages — similar to existing investment products.
Each trade, including execution price and fees, can then be tracked in real-time on Wikifolio and partner sites.
The site went live in Germany in 2012. Since then, investors in Germany and Austria have pumped more than 190 million euros in Wikifolio-certificates — an indicator that this alternative investment model has legs.