Morgan Stanley Invests in iCapital Network to Complete Over $50m Funding Round

Alternative investment platform provider iCapital Network has secured funding from Morgan Stanley Investment Management (NYSE: MS), helping inject capital into its initiative to develop a digital alternative investments platform, the company announced Monday.

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The New York City-based platform received more than $50 million in investment commitments to date from Morgan Stanley, UBS Financial Services and lead investor BlackRock.

Since the public launch of its platform in 2015, iCapital Network claims to have surpassed $2 billion in subscriptions from nearly 3,000 investors across more than 40 private offerings.

The company aims to develop a digital alternative investments platform, which will take advantage of a growing disparity in the financial services space. iCapital offers access to private equity, credit, real estate and venture capital funds. The network includes broker-dealer platforms, private banks, more than 100 family offices and nearly 250 of the largest wealth managers in the industry.

Lawrence Calcano, CEO of iCapital Network, commented: “Our strategic partnerships represent industry confidence in iCapital’s technology-led approach to solving the long-standing obstacles that prevent individual investors from accessing institutional-caliber investments. We are honored to work with companies like Morgan Stanley who believe in and work toward our mission of democratizing access to alternative investments.”

Dan Simkowitz, Head of Morgan Stanley’s investment management, noted: “Endowments and pension funds have long embraced alternatives as an important component of their overall investment programs. Many high-net-worth investors, in our view, are under-allocated to alternatives relative to their institutional counterparts. iCapital’s technology and investment platform successfully removes many of the operational impediments that high-net-worth investors face when seeking to increase their commitments to these strategies. In doing so, we believe that iCapital has significantly improved the client experience for individual investors and those who serve them.”