New Capital, Including Investment from Franklin Templeton,
to Accelerate the Digitization of Alternative Investments
Access, Education, and Execution
Executives of Apollo and Motive Partners Join Fintech
Pioneer CAIS Board of Directors
New York, NY – January 11, 2022 – CAIS, the leading alternative investment platform,
today announced a $225 million round of funding led by Apollo (NYSE: APO) and Motive
Partners (“Motive”), with additional investment from Franklin Templeton (NYSE: BEN),
which values CAIS at more than $1 billion. This new investment follows a $50 million
investment by Eldridge and accelerates CAIS’s mission to modernize how financial advisors
access alternative investments. Blythe Masters, Founding Partner of Motive, and Andrew
Gosden, Managing Director in Financial Services & Strategy at Apollo, will join CAIS’s board
of directors.
Alternative assets are expected to make up to 24% of the global investable market by 2025,
according to the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst Association, up from 12% in
2018. CAIS has doubled its headcount in the last year to meet demand, as transaction
volume has increased by 65 percent year-over-year with the number of platform users
increasing by 60 percent. Building on that momentum, CAIS will use the proceeds of this
financing round to fuel further advancements in technology, enhance the customer
experience, invest in the digitization of product operations and processes, and explore
strategic opportunities.
“We are honored to have Apollo, Motive, and Franklin Templeton as our new
shareholders and partners,” said Matt Brown, Founder and CEO of CAIS.
“This investment advances the critical role CAIS plays in revolutionizing how the
alternative investment and wealth management communities engage, learn, and
transact.”
CAIS serves the independent wealth management community, which has been historically
under-allocated to alternatives when compared with large national broker-dealers or
institutional investors, whether due to complexity, higher minimums, and fees, need for
education, or other barriers to entry. As the first truly open marketplace for alternative
investments, where financial advisors and asset managers can engage and transact at scale,
CAIS seeks to remove these barriers, enabling advisors to enhance outcomes for their
investors and providing managers with centralized access to a highly fragmented wealth
management community.
Financial Technology Partners served as financial advisor to CAIS on the transaction.
About CAIS
CAIS is the leading alternative investment platform for financial advisors who seek improved
access to, and education about, alternative investment funds and products. CAIS provides
financial advisors with a broad selection of alternative investment strategies, including
hedge funds, private equity, private credit, real estate, digital assets, and structured notes,
allowing them to capitalize on opportunities and/or withstand ever-changing markets. CAIS
also provides an industry-leading learning system, CAIS IQ, to help advisors learn faster,
remember longer, and improve client outcomes.
All funds listed on CAIS undergo Mercer’s independent due diligence and ongoing
monitoring. Mercer diligence reports and fund ratings are available to advisors on the CAIS
password-protected platform. CAIS streamlines the end-to-end transaction process through
digital subscriptions and integrated reporting with Fidelity, Schwab, and Pershing, which
make investing in alternatives simple.
“We are excited to invest in CAIS, one of the fintech leaders transforming
alternative investment access for wealth management. At Apollo, we want more
individuals to access alternative strategies and companies like CAIS help to bridge
the gap between asset managers and advisors through their growing platform. We
believe this latest funding round will support the Company’s continued growth and
success,” said Marc Rowan, Co-Founder and CEO of Apollo.
“CAIS has built a unique marketplace for alternatives through a commitment to
excellent service and education. This investment will turbo-charge the technology
transformation of the business towards a modular, flexible cloud-based
architecture, which will modernize the way investors gain access to this asset class,
allowing managers, investors, and their advisors to focus less on process and more
on value-added interactions,” said Blythe Masters, Founding Partner at Motive.
“We believe that individual investors should have access to the same alternative
investment solutions as large institutions, and CAIS is doing just that through its
innovative and user-friendly platform,” said Jenny Johnson, President and CEO
of Franklin Templeton. “CAIS shares our goal of making it easier for advisors and
individual investors to diversify into alternatives to meet their investment
objectives.”
Founded in 2009, CAIS, a fintech leader, is empowering over 4,400+ unique advisor
firms/teams who oversee more than $2T+ in network assets. Since inception, CAIS has
facilitated over $13.8B+ in transaction volume as the first truly open marketplace where
financial advisors and asset managers engage and transact directly on a massive scale. CAIS
has offices in New York, Los Angeles, Austin, and San Francisco.
Securities offered through CAIS Capital LLC, member FINRA, SIPC.
About Apollo
Apollo is a global, high-growth alternative asset manager. In our asset management
business, we seek to provide our clients excess return at every point along the risk-reward
spectrum from investment grade to private equity with a focus on three business strategies:
yield, hybrid, and equity. For more than three decades, our investing expertise across our
fully integrated platform has served the financial return needs of our clients and provided
businesses with innovative capital solutions for growth. Through Athene, our retirement
services business, we specialize in helping clients achieve financial security by providing a
suite of retirement savings products and acting as a solutions provider to institutions. Our
patient, creative, and knowledgeable approach to investing aligns our clients, businesses
we invest in, our employees, and the communities we impact, to expand opportunity and
achieve positive outcomes. As of September 30, 2021, Apollo had approximately $481
billion of assets under management. To learn more, please visit www.apollo.com.
About Motive Partners
Motive Partners is a specialist private equity firm with offices in New York City and London,
focusing on growth equity and buyout investments in software and information services
companies based in North America and Europe and serving five primary subsectors:
Banking & Payments, Capital Markets, Data & Analytics, Investment Management and
Insurance. Motive Partners brings differentiated expertise, connectivity and capabilities to
create long-term value in financial technology companies. More information on Motive
Partners can be found at www.motivepartners.com.
About Franklin Templeton
Franklin Resources, Inc. [NYSE:BEN] is a global investment management organization with
subsidiaries operating as Franklin Templeton and serving clients in over 165 countries.
Franklin Templeton’s mission is to help clients achieve better outcomes through investment
management expertise, wealth management and technology solutions. Through its
specialist investment managers, the Company brings extensive capabilities in equity, fixed
income, multi-asset solutions and alternatives. With offices in more than 30 countries and
approximately 1,300 investment professionals, the California-based company has over 70
years of investment experience and over $1.5 trillion in assets under management as of
November 30, 2021. For more information, please visit franklinresources.com.
For more information please contact:
FOR CAIS
Nadia Damouni
Pro-CAISPR@Prosek.com
FOR APOLLO
Joanna Rose, Global Head of Corporate Communications
Communications@apollo.com
Noah Gunn, Global Head of Investor Relations
IR@apollo.com
FOR MOTIVE PARTNERS
Sam Tidswell-Norrish
Investor Relations
sam@motivepartners.com
FOR FRANKLIN TEMPLETON
Matthew Walsh
matthew.walsh@franklintempleton.com
