Last October, we announced a definitive agreement to acquire SeedInvest, the leading equity crowdfunding platform in the United States and operator of a registered broker-dealer.
We are pleased to announce that after regulatory approval by FINRA, we have closed the acquisition. We are incredibly excited to welcome the SeedInvest family of employees, startups, and investors into Circle.
The acquisition is a further step toward realizing our vision of a more open, global, connected, and inclusive financial system. As a crowdfunding pioneer in the United States, SeedInvest helped to shape the JOBS Act. Today they are at the forefront of enabling startups to raise capital directly from investors over the internet — creating new capital formation options for startups and growth companies, and giving average retail investors the opportunity to invest directly into innovative private companies.
Broadly, we aspire to bring the economic and technical breakthroughs of crypto assets and blockchain technology to traditional forms of financial contracts such as equities and other securities. We believe that the tokenization of financial assets will ultimately unlock capital for growing companies and investment opportunities for people everywhere. Over time, more functions of private equity will be tokenized — including voting and governance, dividend payouts, and other economic features. Tokenization will also create new opportunities for businesses to build better relationships with their customers by leveraging tokens linked to ecosystem behaviors.
More immediately, we welcome the talented SeedInvest team and the incredible community of SeedInvest investors and companies. SeedInvest joins Circle’s team of more than 300 people and global customer base of more than 8.5M individuals and more than 1,000 institutions.
SeedInvest will continue to operate just as they do today, but with additional support behind the company. We will also explore future opportunities enabled by tokenization. As with other areas of our business, we will work closely with leading regulators in the US such as the SEC and FINRA as we evaluate the evolution of private capital market products and services using crypto assets and blockchain technology.