Fresh off a $440 million raise, iCapital CEO Lawrence Calcano is ready to dream the impossible–to unite the alts industry in order to dominate it– despite doubters who say it’s a proven exercise in futility
April 21, 2022 | Oisin Breen | RIABiz
Venture anchored by BlackRock, Blackstone, KKR, Apollo and the Carlyle Group may realize a dominant role by releasing a lingua franca to eradicate data protocol fragmentation.
Lawrence Calcano built iCapital into a $6-billion company by finding a way to sell alternative investments (alts) in a Rubik’s cube market where colors in the data rarely match up.
Now, the chairman and CEO is intent on leveraging his financial capital ($440 million just raised), political capital and critical mass ($112-billion of AUA) to solve the puzzle in a way that works for all investors in the private investments universe.
The iCapital idea is to create real order in the form of frictionless throughput trading by getting hedge funds and private equity firms to agree on one standard for coding, codifying and just calling things what they are across all alts investments.
The journey could hardly have a more alluring destination — to “own” and collect fees from the sale and management of high-margin assets that measure in the trillions of dollars.
iCapital’s ace in the hole is the large a block of influential investment firms — BlackRock, Blackstone, Apollo Group, Morgan Stanley KKR, and the Carlyle Group — that are among those already pledged to abide by a protocol, seasoned by the concept of “coopetition.”
