Chip Davis and Sujith Vishwajith said they’re passionate about what other investors sometimes brush off, like collectible sneakers or NFTs, so they took a different approach toward alternative assets in building their investing app, Roi.
When they joined forces last year to create Roi (pronounced roy) the pair knew they wanted to cater more to investors like themselves—people who care passionately about non-traditional assets.
“We think it is important to represent the current market and the modern portfolio of the modern investor, whereas a lot of traditional older generations are really more focused on 401Ks, stocks, and ETFs,” Davis, Roi’s chief product officer, told Coins2Day.
On Thursday, Roi announced a $3.6 million funding round led by Spark Capital, with participation from NBA star Kevin Durant’s venture capital firm, 35 Ventures, Google’s Gradient Ventures, and angel investor Balaji Srinivasan, the former chief technology officer at Coinbase, among others.
First on the list is expanding their five-person team and bringing on more people to help with product, legal, and security as the company grows, said Vishwajith, the CEO.
Roi lets users add stocks, bonds, and retirement accounts to be viewed in one place, and it provides user with one-stop trading for their Robinhood, Coinbase, TD Ameritrade, and WeBull accounts—without additional fees.
But a substantial part of Roi’s value-add is providing users an overview of all of their crypto and NFT holdings, with more granular data for those wanting to dig deeper. The app can compile crypto holdings from across several decentralized wallets to show an investor how much Bitcoin, Ether, or even Dogecoin they hold at one time, and the value of those holdings by the second. It can do the same with NFTs.
Offering investors, especially younger ones, a fuller view of all of their holdings—both traditional and Web3-based—is what sets Roi apart, Vishwajith said.
“Mint and Personal Capital and all the traditional companies exclude crypto, NFTs, alternative assets,” Vishwajith said. “We actually bring them in and treat them as well as we do stocks.”
