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Eric Woo and Chris Shen were forced to pivot three times before they found a business model that worked. The company they settled on — Revere — has been selected as a finalist for RIA Intel’s Most Innovative Technology of the Year award.
Eric Woo and Chris Shen, the CEO and COO of Revere — a San Francisco Bay Area-based, self-described turnkey asset management platform for venture capital — started their own company in 2020. Since then, they’ve changed the business plan three times.
“When you’re starting something new, you have to force yourself to pivot if something’s not working,” Woo said.
They finally landed on Revere, a company that they hope will help democratize venture capital by providing intelligence, market data, and ratings for investors so that they have a more accurate sense of what’s going on in the market.
Woo said that they’re treating Revere as the Morningstar of venture capital. “What they do in terms of ratings, actual intelligence, and market data for investors in fixed income, equity, etc., we’re doing for venture capital,” he explained.
Both founders come from the investing world.
Woo worked on the institutional investor fund side before moving to Angelist, one of the world’s largest angel investment platforms. Shen, meanwhile, spent 13 years in Asia working in corporate finance M&A, five of which was spent running a multibillion-dollar family office. Shen said that even as the co-founder of a family with billions in assets, he struggled to get access to brand names.
“That kind of turned on the light bulb, so to speak — if I was having that problem, there had to be other allocators, advisors, and investors out there who were going through the same thing,” Shen said.
The company provides tiered offerings for advisors and investors. For advisors or sophisticated investors who want actionable information, Revere will source it, run due diligence, and create equity reports that advisors can share with clients.
For clients who want more, however, Revere offers a full-service solution.
“We are the first TAMP for venture capital,” Shen said. They have a ratings report, a menu of funds, and a full-service enterprise solution. “Like Vanguard, we drop in, we advise, we help, and we become a sub-advisor for something that’s a little more bespoke for their clients,” Shen said.
On the ratings side, the company has about 150 funds in their pipeline, with about 64 that have been fully vetted and rated. Woo said that the company also has four thematic funds that can be bought off the shelf, and he added that they’ve also built custom bespoke mandates for a few TAMPS, family offices, and asset managers.
The company recently closed a seed round of funding led by Cherubic Ventures — with participation from Overlay Capital, Oyster Ventures, Benhamou Global Ventures, and MDSV Ventures — for $4 million.
The inaugural RIA Intel Awards is a celebration of financial advisors, wealth management firms, and industry leaders. Winners will be on announced on RIAIntel.com September 14, 2022 and will be honored in-person at upcoming RIA Institute Forums.
