I’m thrilled to announce my investment in Upvest. Upvest strives to be the easiest API to build applications on the blockchain. Upvest currently offers a non-custodial blockchain stack into any frontend of a customer to allow the storing & trading of crypto/ other digital assets for financial institutions and their end customers. The Upvest API features include storing and recovery of any asset on the blockchain, fast transaction speeds and low fees.

The blockchain will have a fundamental impact on many industries, none more so than financial services. Areas like Asset Tokenisation and Crypto custody are at the forefront of those changes and I believe that Upvest is uniquely positioned to provide a blockchain agnostic software solution that any financial institution can integrate easily. The Berlin blockchain ecosystem, as well as a very forward-thinking German regulator, means that Upvest is in the right market for great tech talent and early adopting customers, which will put the business in a position of strength when expanding domestically and internationally.

As well as having a great product, the Upvest team are a fantastic mix of repeat founders with deep domain expertise in blockchain technology and financial services. When looking at the Notion Unicorn Trajectory on team development, they align strongly with it and also have some further great hires joining soon. Martin, Upvest’s CEO and founder, has an exceptional level of knowledge about blockchain and a distinct view its future and its usage within financial institutions. Overall, they are an impressive team and I expect great things from them.

An important factor when considering our investment into Upvest is how quickly the market will adopt blockchain, so it gave us great confidence knowing that Upvest already has more than 20 customers and is building a track record with the early adopters like Exporo and Bitwala. When the second wave of adopters move into the market, Upvest will be one of the few providers with a proven track record and multiple case studies of usage, giving the likes of banks and insurers much greater confidence when it comes to working together in the future.

Ultimately, I took the decision to invest into Upvest because I believe that the team have what it takes to build an industry-defining software business on top of the blockchain as 10% of global GDP is expected to be tokenized by 2030 (World Economic Forum) and the deep adoption of blockchain across many aspects of financial services becomes a reality. I am very excited to work with Martin and the team and look forward to building something special together.

Why Notion? A note from the founders…

From the beginning, Notion shared our ambition of building a global category leader from scratch. On this journey, we value Notion's positive and supportive attitude as well as entrepreneurial freedom.

It is a partnership in which both respect each other and help where they can. No egos, no bullshit. This is paired with the exceptional experience of the partners, who have done it successfully before. We feel that this is a missing combination in the venture capital industry.

On the operational side, the Notion platform is invaluable to apply best practices to B2B software businesses and pragmatism to the blockchain industry, which is exactly what we've been looking for. A practical example of this is mastering HR, which is the biggest challenge in scaling a vastly growing tech company. Notion's expertise and support are unparalleled in the industry.