Howard was first on our team to write about the founders (Chris Bruno, Max Niederste-Ostholt, Rob Petrozzo) and team at Rally Road.
RallyRd is a mobile platform which provides investment opportunities in individual, high-end, blue-chip automobiles. RallyRd intends to democratize the collector car market by providing passionate automobile enthusiasts with an opportunity to invest in the market, even if they may not have the financial capability to purchase one of these beautiful cars on their own. RallyRd are currently targeting the 50 million US auto-enthusiasts, more than 25 million of whom have seen car auctions (Barrett-Jackson and Mecum), in order to allow them to participate in the classic car auction space. The opportunity is in monetizing off of enthusiasts’ desire to participate in their passion, while giving them an opportunity to grow their wealth as well.
RallyRd securitizes each individual asset into a mini-company, which is then packaged into an Initial Car Offering (ICO). After educating participants about the asset through a variety of mediums such as photo and video, RallyRd allows investors to participate in the ICO through the RallyRd app. Using the app, participants can then also engage in a secondary market as the value of the asset fluctuates.
The RallyRd app in action.
To get a better idea of what RallyRd is really up to, checkout CEO Chris Bruno discuss with Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business News.
Chris, Max and Rob and are three life-long friends, who have always followed the collector car market, but never felt like they had an access lane to get inside the velvet rope. It was easy to dig in around RallyRd as the guys are fully transparent and as eager to learn from our team as we were about their business.
Max, Rob & Chris (from left to right)
Estimates put the size of the collector car market at 10 billion dollars, with RallyRd focusing specifically on bluechip cars. The value of these has increased more than 300% in the last decade according to the Hagerty index, which tracks the average value of the 25 most sought-after automobiles (adjusted for inflation):
As you can see, the vehicles on Rally Rd. represent an asset class that has historically outperformed the stock market as well as other alternative asset classes (including gold, fine art, and real estate). Expanded opportunity lies in rebranding and increasing the number of available markets to investors. All of these markets could feasibly be adapted to this model and significantly increase the market size of the product.
Rally Road’s mission is to democratize alternative investments like these, providing access, liquidity, and transparency to markets that have traditionally only been available to a select few.
We’re excited to help RallyRd bring their vision to life. It truly is where People, Passion and Profit meet.
Techcrunch recently covered our investment along with the company’s press release.
Social Leverage intern, Samuel Roland, contributed to the research for the blog post.