Silicon Valley technology startup Zanbato, the world’s first online marketplace for infrastructure secondaries trading, is gearing up to launch later this month, the firm announced today.
San Francisco investment banking firm Sutter Securities has received clearance from US regulators Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and FINFRA to operate the Zanbato platform as an alternative trading system (ATS).
The ATS designation was created in 1998 by the SEC to help develop electronic financial markets. ATS’ “are designed to match buyers and sellers of securities, who participate in large transactions that would be difficult to execute via traditional excahnges,” Zanbato explained in a statement.
Zanbato has been in private beta testing for the past year-and-a-half, accumulating 600 members and identifying over $24 billion in investment opportunities. More than 400 of its members are infrastructure investment funds, developers and operators.
The platform allows “qualified parties [to] become members at no charge, with only a very small transaction fee charged on successfully consummated transactions,” Zanbato said, without disclosing the size of the fee. Zanbatto Sutter also offers services to help members raise capital, sell assets, and launch tenders through the platform, among others.
Zanbato aims to tackle infrastructure’s famous illiquidity. Ryan Orr, co-chairman of Zanbato and faculty member at Stanford University, estimates that “infrastructure finance is perhaps the largest private investment market in the world”. But Bob Muh, chief executive of Sutter Securities, also believes it is one of the world’s most technologically backwards markets:
“Infrastructure finance is one of the few remaining asset classes that have not yet fully embraced modern internet technology. This is why we are excited to partner with Zanbato,” he said in a statement.
Zanbato, which in Japanese anime and manga is a fictional large curved sword used by characters, will launch its infrastructure platform on April 24.
Additionally, the company has teamed up with the African Development Bank to build Sokoni, an online infrastructure finance marketplace for Africa. It is also in a partnership with the government of Oregon to develop an investment platform focused on economic development projects in the US Pacific North West.
To learn more about the Zanbato Sutter ATS, please click here.
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