A Thank You to Our Community As We Look Ahead

June 20, 20214 min read
A Thank You to Our Community As We Look Ahead
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Yieldstreet is committed to building the Digital Private Bank of the future. It will be built for the many, not just for the chosen few. Here’s our vision for what the future could look like.

We started Yieldstreet with a simple mission: better access to investment products that were reserved for the Top 1% or institutions, modernize portfolios, generate income, and strengthen retirement savings. Six years later, we are a community of 300,000 strong – and growing – that has invested almost $2,000,000,000 (yes, billion!). Yieldstreet has already repaid more than $950 million to our investors, generating passive income and asset growth (IRR of 11.2%1) that most consumers would never have earned without Yieldstreet.  

Hence it is with great excitement and pride that we share the news of our $100 million Series C funding round. We are thankful to you, the Yieldstreet community, for your trust and support every step of the way. As founders, we’re energized by a vision and mission that we believe will continue to add measurable value to your life and the world. 

Our vision is to provide for broader access to institutional quality investments and narrow the income & opportunity gap so that “your money can work as hard for you as you do for it.”  At Yieldstreet we call this Self-Driving Money. Our mission is to help millions of people enhance their financial independence by offering access to unique investments that are hard to find elsewhere that generate passive income and asset growth. We are striving to build a Digital Private Bank, a journey that began in 2015 and we continue to sprint towards. By 2025 we hope to enable 5 million people to invest $25 billion and generate $3 billion of returns for you, our Yieldstreet community. 

You might be wondering; How will any of this change my life? 

Leading institutions and uber-wealthy folks recognize that the 60/40 model is broken and that we need to modernize our portfolios. Bond yields are at all-time lows and stocks are way too volatile to be a portfolio’s lone holding. Simply put, we believe that our financial needs aren’t being met. As consumers, we have changed a lot in the last decade. And while it seems that many other consumer-centric businesses have adapted, the world of finance has not. 

Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane. 10 years ago, our day-to-day shopping was local: we were patrons of the local baker, butcher, fisherman, florist, hardware, or variety shop. Today, we log into a single site like Amazon to complete the majority of our shopping needs. We all find ourselves in places designed to help us to get the most out of one experience. Why should managing our financial livelihood be any more challenging or less convenient? 

People deserve a singular platform built on state-of-the-art technology and capability. We believe it’s time for a consumer-first platform that prioritizes retail investors and their needs, not the financial institutions. That means building a beautiful user experience that’s digitally native and mobile first. It means creating transparency around fees and performance, delivering educational content, and most importantly, offering you a diverse and curated list of investments, offering liquidity in alternatives, and to allow you to invest alongside world renowned investors. The uber-wealthy already have much of this: a highly personalized team of experienced private bankers providing a holistic planning, investing and lending experience. Now it’s our turn – this is the Digital Private Bank we are trying to build and we are committed to delivering an experience one can only dream of today. 

In order to achieve our goal, we completed our third fundraising round. We plan to use the proceeds to keep building out Yieldstreet to deliver a more holistic and enhanced experience for our growing community. Our key themes are (i) reach more consumers, (ii) more access and diversity of investments products, (iii) top-tier advice including broad financial planning and goal setting, tax and estate planning, (iii) provide liquidity via secondary market, (iv) hiring the most passionate and best people, and (v) pursue strategic acquisitions. 

While we are focused on achieving our goals and building the best Yieldstreet we can, you can be a part of guiding us there. Your feedback is critical and essential to us. You have the opportunity to help shape the future of investing and we call upon you to engage with us. As all businesses, we have been through some ups and downs, but our commitment is to remain focused on you, our community. Thank you for your continued support and trust on this journey. We’ve got so much more to accomplish, but it’s starting to feel more achievable by the day — and that makes tomorrow even more exciting. 

Milind Mehere & Michael Weisz

  1. The internal rate of return (“IRR”) represents an average net realized IRR with respect to all matured investments weighted by the investment size of each individual investment, made by private investment vehicles managed by YieldStreet Management, LLC from July 1, 2015 through and including May 24th, 2021, after deduction of management fees and all other expenses charged to investments.