How would your company, which has
already kind of led the way in um
helping retail investors get pieces of
these kind of assets, how is a company
like Atomic going to help them put them
in their 401ks? So, to take a step back,
it's important first of all to
understand what Atomic does. So, we're
not a direct to consumer application.
Instead, we partner with companies and
institutions that are looking to offer
different investing products to their
clients. So we partner with companies
like Nerd Wallet, companies like
BlueVine, companies like Yield Street
that provide access to private market
investments to their clients. And so the
way that Atomic could work in this
particular space is actually to work
with retirement plan providers and
record keepers to be the custodian for
these underlying private market
investments uh in their plans. So the
the uh the balance that I guess
regulators are trying to strike here is
allowing um people in their retirement
accounts to have um access to these what
are fairly risky and sometimes illquid
products and um keeping them safe right
from blowups. Uh how do you think this
is going to work? like obviously some
alternative investments um the ill
liquidity isn't a problem since they're
retirement accounts. On the other hand,
when you say yield street, I think about
crypto. So, how's that going to work?
>> So, you're right. You know, liquidity is
one of the gating factors for broader
acceptance of private market
investments. But if you think about it
in the context of a retirement plan, you
know, typically these are longerdated
investment plans. And so when we speak
to practitioners in the space, many of
them are looking at putting it into
target date funds and having it be a
small slice, maybe five to 10% of the
overall allocation. As for crypto, I do
believe that there are advancements
happening in the tokenization space to
actually provide even more liquidity on
top of these private market investments.
>> I'm curious what demand looks like. Uh
we were speaking to Deb Bdon of Schroers
yesterday on the close. They recently
put out a study that found that 45% of
the investors that they surveyed would
actually like to add private assets into
their uh retirement plans. And I wonder
if you have any sense of what that
demand looks like because we know that
you know the the the issuers who
actually h are trying to offer this up
certainly want to make this happen. But
uh does the end investor thinking about
their retirement plan truly want this as
well? So I think the proxy that we use
to gauge demand for private market
investments in retirement plans is what
we're actually seeing in taxable
accounts. So as mentioned we are already
providing access to private market
investments and taxable accounts and
we're seeing it as a product that's
actually gaining quite a lot of steam
especially private credit funds. U most
of our investors at least you know with
some of our partners are investing huge
sums uh to get additional yield in those
products.
>> Well you mentioned private credit and
that's something else I was curious
about. We say private assets, but that's
a pretty broad umbrella. You think that,
you know, the average person has heard
about private equity, might have some
idea of what that means? Private credit
hasn't been socialized to the same
degree. It feels like
>> it hasn't. It hasn't been. It's only
been in the last, you know, maybe since
2010, uh, that it's become a lot more
commonplace for people to invest in
private, uh, credit. But I'd say for the
mass retail investor, it hasn't been
truly accessible mainly because of
accreditation requirements. And at the
same time, there aren't that many
platforms that are giving access to
these uh securities in a way that is
accessible. So in a fractional way for
example
>> this that's that's why I think Yield
Street is so interesting because you can
do uh private credit uh litigation
finance art collectibles and then the
fractional ownership is something that
you were uh doing even before that
partnership at Atomic. I remember before
you even had your partnership with Nerd
Wallet. Your business has grown
significantly since then. Um and to that
uh point you've got some new financing.
tell us about the latest round.
>> Yeah, so we just closed a $30 million
raise um from different venture capital
firms as well as institutions like
Nationwide Erie Insurance into it as
well as Aqualine and Brewer Lane. Um you
know, the company has grown
significantly over the last year. We've
more than 52fold the number of investing
accounts that we serve. We've tripled
revenue. We now trade about $20 billion
on an annualized basis. And so this
round is very exciting to allow us to
broaden our mandates in serving
traditional financial institutions as
well as companies in different regions
of the