Darksquare has announced that it has now gone live with its first investment deal rolled out to beta users. The company said that as of last week it had a further 25 beta slots available on the platform.
Darksquare is a UK-based investment platform that allows individual investors to invest in alternative investment opportunities that were previously out of reach. It is now live with access to early-access customers. It is aiming to grant investors access to projects like wind and solar farms, forests and timberland, distressed debt and special situations credit.
Other projects may include real estate, the company said. Projects will be fractionalised with investors typically being provided with a 30 day window to decide whether to commit. Darksquare will set a minimum size for the total investment and will initiate once that is reached.
The minimum investment for most of the investments that will be available on Darksquare is £5000. The firm said that some projects might have a lower minimum. Darksquare stressed that it is not trading in NFTs or other tokens – investments are fractionalised and intended mainly for wealthy or sophisticated investors.
Darksquare’s rationale is to provide investors with access to some of the opportunities that are generally out of reach and usually reserved for hedge funds and private equity. It has been set up as an FCA regulated SPV used to own the asset, which can then be farmed out to investors.
The company’s first deal for its early adopters is with lending platform Plend: Plend was set up to provide UK borrowers with a way to borrow through a personalised loan application process while at the same time contributing to a more financially inclusive world.
Darksquare was established by Daniel Harman, who was previously a distressed and special situations trader at RBS, where he looked after £600m of bonds, loans, unlisted equity and CDS. His co-founder and CTO is Alex Whitney, a full stack software engineer with over 10 years of experience in the financial services sector.
