Ownership data management leader AST introduces new cloud-based platform built on blockchain, leveraging AI and predictive analytics.
AST, through its Private Company Solutions (AST PCS) business unit, launched its innovative software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based Astrella solution for privately-held companies, providing capitalization (cap) table and employee stock plan ownership data management tools for investors and employees. The SaaS solution, which provides employees and investors access to their holdings through a mobile app and integrates with partner companies such as Box, CharliAI, EquityZen, Derivatas and others, provides a total solution for small seed stage companies as well as larger, unicorn companies.
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“The ‘new normal’ economic conditions after the COVID-19 outbreak portend great change for a private ownership market that was already increasingly global in nature and rapidly transforming, from an undisciplined past to structured corporate activity, trading and investment”
Astrella arrives at a time when private companies are waiting longer to contemplate an investor exit or a public offering — especially under today’s challenging market conditions. Cap tables are becoming more complex, and as a result, investors and employees are demanding sophisticated shareholder solutions like secondary market platforms and liquidity and lending programs. The growth and maturity of private markets requires maturity in ownership data management tools equal to public companies providing information and analysis of current executive ownership, equity value across investment rounds, and equity dilution. With the ability to track companies regardless of the country incorporated or their functional currency, Astrella is the first truly global solution built using private blockchain technology, predictive analytics and AI.
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Marty Flanigan, CEO of AST, stated, “Until we built Astrella, private shareholder technology was decades behind public companies’. AST is the industry-leading provider for IPO services, shareholder communications and ownership data management. Our clients were asking us to leverage that expertise and develop a self-service solution supporting private companies globally. Astrella is a natural extension of what we do in meeting these needs. In combining our private company solutions with our public company suite of services, we now offer end-to-end self-service solutions to both private company as well as public company clients.”
Incorporating both distributed ledger and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, Astrella is designed from the ground up to bring new efficiencies and transparency to the growing equity ownership market and the increasing number of private equity firms, venture capital firms, family offices and others. Astrella is also designed to support multi-company portfolios, including private equity firms that wish to manage all of their companies in one place.
