With the pandemic limiting spending on dining and travel, lockdowns creating massive engagement to pass time, and individuals focused on their financial security served as a catalyst that led to a renewed interest in collectibles. From baseball cards to NFTs to fine wine, investors, speculators, and average citizens began pouring funds into investments that have traditionally been reserved for the ultra-wealthy. Koia is an alternative investment platform that democratizes the ownership of highly-coveted collectibles by offering fractional ownership and allows users to buy, collect, and trade these alternative assets. The platform offers ownership in a unique, verified, and rare assets that are acquired by the recently-launched company that also handles storage, insurance, and maintenance. Individuals can invest in each asset “drop” for as little as €50. Koia features fine wines, rare scotches, card collectibles, and fine watches with plans to offer any physical or digital asset.
London TechWatch caught up with Koia Cofounder and CEO Iris ten Teije to learn more about the growth in alternate asset investing, the founding team’s inspiration to launch the business, Koia’s future plans, recent round of funding, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
Pre-seed $1.4M from Seedcamp, RTP Global, Portfolio Ventures, and several Angels.
Tell us about your product or service.
Koia is on a mission to make alternative assets accessible, and build a community and passion-driven platform to buy, collect and trade alternative assets.
Through fractional ownership, anyone can get access to alternative assets such as fine wine, watches, and Pokémon Cards. Koia also takes care of sourcing, authentication, storage, and insurance, so users get all of the benefits and none of the hassle.
What inspired the start of Koia?
As founders, we’ve all been interested in investing for many years, both personally and professionally and we wanted to further open up opportunities to everyday investors.
We were fascinated by the rise of all kinds of new and alternative assets, with crypto of course being the one that has been in the spotlight most. There has also been a growing interest in investing in traditional stocks and shares and over the past decade due to innovations in technology, finance, and business models access to stock investing has become 10x easier, cheaper, and faster. Think of buying a fractional share in a company with a low-cost broker from your mobile phone.
At the same time, when it comes to passion assets, these types of assets are still completely inaccessible to all but the very wealthy due to high unit costs and even if you have the money, the process to buy is complicated due to having to think of for instance storage, insurance, and authentication. We realised there was an opportunity here to make buying a fraction of a Rolex as easy as buying a fractional share of your favorite company and make alts accessible and mainstream.
How is it different?
Today there are various marketplaces or dealers where people can buy, say, an expensive watch. However, these high-end collectibles are only accessible to the very wealthy and the buyer would have to have a good amount of knowledge about the industry to know what to buy and take care of insurance and authentication.
Fractional ownership is a game-changer and allows us to open up access to these assets to anyone.
What market you are targeting and how big is it?
We ultimately want to become a global platform and the sky is the limit!
The market for physical and digital collectibles is large and growing, with digital collectibles having surprised $40N in sales last year and the general physical collectibles market estimated to be worth over $400N annually.
Because fractional ownership is a new concept, it will also attract a lot of new users to the market who currently aren’t yet into it due to high costs and barriers to entry.
Moreover, interest in alternative assets has grown massively as well over the last few years and there is an increased interest and awareness that you can invest in anything. Be that sneakers, art, or cryptocurrencies and NFTs.
What’s your business model?
We will have 3 different revenue streams: a commission paid by the seller; a buyer fee to cover storage and insurance and a secondary market trading fee once our secondary market is live.
What are your post-COVID office plans?
We’re a remote team! We do use coworking spaces if people like to have a place to work but otherwise we’re optimising our processes to be able to operate remotely.
What was the funding process like?
As probably any startup founder would tell you, you have to get through many “no’s” before getting your first “yes”! Persistence is key and it’s also important to learn from rejections, especially if similar feedback keeps coming up over and over again.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
As an early-stage company, you don’t yet have all the metrics, so you really have to convince investors about the potential, vision, and team.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
The timing is perfect: interest in collectibles is at an all-time high, with 2021 seeing record-breaking sales across a wide range of categories from sneakers to trading cards to whisky; auction houses tripled their sales in the first half of the year, and companies selling physical collectibles like StockX reached multi-billion dollar valuations. With soaring inflation rates, real-world collectible assets that Koia provides access to are only becoming more desirable. Meanwhile, digital assets are also thriving with NFTs surpassing $40B in sales.
The timing is perfect: interest in collectibles is at an all-time high, with 2021 seeing record-breaking sales across a wide range of categories from sneakers to trading cards to whisky; auction houses tripled their sales in the first half of the year, and companies selling physical collectibles like StockX reached multi-billion dollar valuations. With soaring inflation rates, real-world collectible assets that Koia provides access to are only becoming more desirable. Meanwhile, digital assets are also thriving with NFTs surpassing $40B in sales.
In addition, we’ve got the right team and mix of skills in order to bring this product to market. Our founders have spent their careers across traditional financial services firms and fintech startups and have experience across marketing, wealth management, and building technology platforms.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We want to get thousands of users to sign up for the Koia App and get all of our exciting assets sold out in minutes. Moreover, we’re working on an improved app design and user experience and building a web app!
What advice can you offer companies in London that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Do as much user research as possible to find out what your audience wants – it’s ok if this is a manual process! Then try to get some traction on the back of those insights before reaching out to investors.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We’re growing our team and want to add more features and asset classes to the product. We’re starting off with whisky, wine and watches but have a lot more interesting asset drops planned for the year.
What is your favourite restaurant in London?
This is a hard question! Let me give one for each of my favourite categories…
- Thai: Som Saa
- Dumplings: Xi Home Dumplings
- Pasta: Emilia’s Crafted Pasta
