Happy New Year!
Ask A CIO #57
It’s late in the day here on New Year’s Eve, and I just wanted to send a quick note. I won’t keep you long.
Instead of an investment related topic this week, I’d like to take this moment to reflect on our buildout of Ivy Invest, the company. Thank you for indulging me.
We started Ivy Invest in 2023. For those of you who’ve known us since the beginning, you know that we started this business with a simple premise. Endowments and foundations tend to invest very differently compared to individual investors. Individual investors, should they want to, should be able to invest like those large, sophisticated endowments and foundations.
That’s it. Oh, and it should feel easy for those individual investors. Easy on the tech side, easy on the investment side. No complicated hoops, no wealth minimums, no tyranny of choice.
In 2024, our endowment style fund1 was declared effective by the SEC, and we launched our tech platform (iOS app and web). We spent the rest of the year building out the Fund’s portfolio and testing out our tech platform.
We’re incredibly grateful to our friends and family who were our first investors and platform beta testers! The only way to invest in our Fund in the early days was to download a developer version of our iOS app via TestFlight. As we moved from TestFlight to the version of the platform that is available to anyone today, our intrepid early investors and beta testers helped us discover and fix a whole host of unexpected hiccups.
We learned that people (or maybe just some of our friends and family) are not great at accurately entering their own data. That no matter how many times you remind them to use their full legal names, they’ll still try to open an account as “Bob” instead of “Robert.” These things matter for KYC!
We were fortunate to have very patient early investors willing to troubleshoot with us for hours as we realized our tech platform was rejecting individuals with hyphens or apostrophes in their names. For a time, our platform also flat rejected Brooklyn residents, refusing to acknowledge the borough as a valid address. Apologies to Brooklyn, and needless to say, that issue has long since been fixed!
In 2025, we publicly opened our platform to all investors. It was a terrifying moment, wondering whether folks outside our friends and family would want what we had built. It has been exhilarating to learn that the answer is in fact, yes. We’re incredibly grateful to the many investors who have joined us this year!
We’ve spent this year refining our platform, building out the infrastructure, and laying the groundwork to scale. We’re ready and excited to hit the ground running next year.
One more thing before I wrap up – we’re actively adding to the team. I’ll put it out here, in case you might know the perfect candidate. We’re hiring for a growth marketer, ideally someone with strong early-stage consumer company experience. You know how to reach me: askacio@ivyinvest.co!
Wishing you all a wonderful, healthy, and prosperous new year!
See you in two weeks,
Wendy
If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy the Ivy Invest app!
Click below to below to create an account and learn more about our endowment-style fund:
The Institutional Investment Strategy Fund is an investment company registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940. IISF is a closed-end fund operating as an interval fund that makes quarterly repurchase offers and as such provides limited liquidity. The fund commenced operations on March 1, 2024. An investor should consider the investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses of an investment. The Prospectus contains this and other information. Read it carefully before investing.