Since our founding in 2012, Fundrise has relentlessly pursued a singular mission: to build a better financial system by empowering the individual investor. For that reason, we are extremely excited to announce that we will soon be taking yet another major step on that journey, making our first significant expansion outside of private real estate, with the launch of the Fundrise Innovation Fund — a first-of-its-kind, $1B growth equity fund aimed at democratizing access to investments in top private technology companies.

Although we are immensely proud of what we’ve built to date, we believe we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the opportunities that we can unlock for investors. The proprietary systems and technology infrastructure we created to tap into private real estate are now capable of disrupting ownership of other asset classes previously inaccessible to individuals — in short, Fundrise has the potential to not only open up but completely transform the entire $10 trillion private market.

Our decision to expand into high-growth technology companies is multi-factored. First, as an asset class, high-growth tech (i.e. venture capital) has proven to be one of the best performing investments1 while simultaneously being one of the most exclusive with individuals effectively barred from investing until companies go public.

Meanwhile, we believe that the current market turmoil and distress in the venture capital industry makes today a uniquely opportune time (perhaps the best in the past decade) to launch a fund focused on the space. As the old saying goes, be greedy when others are fearful.

To that end, our aim is for the Innovation Fund to take a “multi-stage” approach, investing in a diversified portfolio of high-growth private technology companies across both mid and late stages, as well as holding some public equities. Of course, as you’ve come to expect, we’ve also created a significantly lower fee model for the Fund, stripping out entirely the “carried interest” profit sharing component that we believe is not only excessive in cost but also leads to inherent misalignment.

We intend to open the Innovation Fund for investment on a limited basis beginning in the next few weeks starting with investors in our iPO. From there, we expect to provide the opportunity to invest to select groups of investors over the course of several months as the fund ramps up. It’s worth noting that investing in private technology companies is not the same as investing in real estate and like all investments there are inherent risks that investors should both understand and take into careful consideration.

Lastly, I want to say thank you again for your continued support. The last ten years have been an exciting journey, one that has only been possible because of our incredible investors. As we look ahead to this next chapter, we are as excited now as we’ve ever been.

As always, if you have any questions or ideas you’d like to share with us please don’t hesitate to reach out to our Investor Relations team at investments@fundrise.com.

Onward,
Ben & the entire Fundrise team

P.S. Listen to the latest episode of our podcast, Onward, where we go in-depth on our plans for the Innovation Fund.

VIEW THE INNOVATION FUND