Seedrs acquires Junction Investments a looks to US expansion
Seedrs has acquired California-based Junction Investments and looks to expand to the United States in early 2015. Junction’s co-founders, Adam Kaufman and Brian Goldsmith, are now Co-Heads of Seedrs America, and they will be leading this expansion.
The Seedrs and Junction teams are very excited about the opportunities that our combination creates, wanted to share some background to the transaction and an overview of next steps.Seedrs USA
A founding principle of Seedrs is that investment in startups and growth businesses should be global. Seedrs believe in a future where entrepreneurs and investors from all over the world can connect online. Investors should be able to discover and invest in opportunities anywhere, and entrepreneurs should be able to access capital worldwide.
Financial regulation remains largely national or regional, however, and compliance with applicable law has always been a non-negotiable element of Seedrs’s approach to business. Building a global platform is thus a multi-stage process that involves identifying the right approaches and partners in different jurisdictions.
Adam Kaufman and Brian Goldsmith are two exceptionally impressive individuals. Adam is a graduate of Columbia University and Yale Law School and has worked as a corporate lawyer with Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz (one of New York’s pre-eminent law firms) and as an investment banker with Goldman Sachs. Brian, a graduate of Harvard University and Stanford Law School, served as a producer for the CBS Evening News, one of the leading television news programmes in the United States.
Adam and Brian came together to found Junction in 2012. Their vision and ethos were similar to ours: they wanted to provide a simple and straightforward way for a wide range of investors to access growth assets. They decided to focus initially on investments in entertainment assets, including Hollywood films, before expanding more widely.
Over the past two years, the Junction team has done a remarkable job of building the foundation of a great business. Among other things, they have built out an exceptional set of relationships in the investment and business communities, and they have gone through the arduous process of establishing a registered broker-dealer and an investment adviser (the two regulated entities that cover the equivalent of our FCA permissions).
At the same time, Adam and Brian believed that combining with a platform that already had significant reach and resources would allow Junction to move further and faster than it could have done on its own.
