North Coast Ventures recently made a pre-seed investment in Wizest, a next-generation platform for investing, trading and learning.
The starting point for our interest in Wizest is the core opportunity they address - more than 50% of Americans do not invest in the stock market. Many see it as complicated and intimidating, and lastly. Wizest’s vision is to make investing more accessible with an intuitive solution that creates a more engaging experience through trust, strategic development and calculated decisions.
Wizest takes a community approach to democratizing the stock market through a platform that allows users to curate their own team of financial experts to start, manage and build an investment portfolio. In addition, users can copy portfolios in one click, and follow the experts’ trades with frequent commentary and explanations from experts in a centralized news feed. While the initial beta was offered to consumers directly, the Wizest model is to partner with financial institutions to offer this capability to their customers in a B2B2C motion.
Founder and CEO Axel Thibon is an experienced technology executive with a background in the banking industry. Prior to Wizest, he built and launched a new Digital Bank, TotalDirectBank, the online division of City National Bank of Florida. Axel balances an entrepreneurial mindset with analytical rigor, and has built an impressive team of alumni from MIT, Visa and Amazon.
NCV was impressed to see Wizest initially backed by industry veterans like Karl Roessner, former CEO of E*Trade and Apex Clearing, a top clearing and custody platform. We are joined in our investment by JumpStart Ventures and other individual investors.
The NCV team sees significant momentum in Wizest’s recent SEC regulatory approval, over 1,500 signups and several partnership opportunities with leading financial institutions. Despite the current economic and stock market headwinds, we believe Wizest is well positioned to capitalize on this opportunity.
About North Coast Ventures
North Coast Ventures (NCV) is a Cleveland-based early-stage venture capital firm primarily investing in B2B, SaaS companies. With over 400 member investors, NCV is the largest, single-chapter investor group in the country. Since 2006, NCV and its member investors have deployed more than $90M into 67 high-potential ventures.
For more information about North Coast Ventures and its portfolio, visit northcoast.vc.