SOM alumni change traditional investment services
As School of Management students, Natasha Bansgopaul ’08 and Sang Lee ’08 worked together on case competitions and class projects. Each had an entrepreneurial spirit and a sense that someday they’d work together again. It happened when they saw a black hole in the financial services industry.
DarcMatter (DM) is how they filled that hole. Since 2014, the online platform has connected fund managers with investors in the alternative investment space — tech markets, private equity real estate and hedge funds. Processes that lived exclusively on paper, such as investor verification and document sharing, are replicated online using DM’s platform, which provides easier access to a pipeline of deals.
“Traditionally, investors believed that alternative investment opportunities were limited to institutional investors, but it was actually the difficulty of connecting with the right investors that made it so limited,” Lee says. “It’s something that should be more widely accessible, because it’s needed for portfolio diversification.”
“We’ve taken the most-opaque segment of the marketplace and made it more transparent,” Bansgopaul says.
In five years, DM has grown to nearly 3,000 investors in more than 60 countries. To grow quickly, Bansgopaul and Lee drew on their work with lobbyists and regulators on the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, a law intended to encourage funding of small businesses by easing securities regulations.
“Our work revolved around the democratization of finance and crowdfunding,” Lee says. “It was one thing to study finance [at SOM], but it was another to see it in action during the height of the financial crisis. Nobody was using anything on the internet for specific reasons. We didn’t even have advanced smartphones at the time, so we were the pioneering class in that respect.”
“The regulation took time to come to fruition,” Bansgopaul says. “You had to develop a way to operate in the gray or leverage technology for your benefit, and that’s where DM came from.”
About a year ago, to capitalize on the growing interest in cryptocurrencies, DM launched the blockchain development consulting division Konstellation.
“In 10 years, finance will be unrecognizable from what it is today, with cryptocurrency emerging across the globe,” Lee says. “The pace of change has accelerated so much since we started DM. We’ve moved from when financial professionals going on the internet was a big no-no to how interconnected we are now. That’s only going to increase, and we’ll be ready.”