OpenInvest

Founded by a team of hedge fund and NGO alumni, OpenInvest launched its platform in 2015 to enable retail investors to tailor their portfolios to their personal values in an automated way, for instance by screening out weapons manufacturers stocks or overweighting LGBTQ friendly companies, while still closely tracking the overall stock market performance. In 2017, bolstered by $3.25 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, OpenInvest was preparing to launch an app targeted at millennial customers that would include a novel proxy voting feature that allowed clients to vote on shareholder resolutions with a simple swipe. With this technological addition, OpenInvest was well on its way towards realizing its mission of democratizing socially responsible investing, bringing transparency to the financial services market, and enabling retail investors to invest their capital in a way that aligned with their values. However, getting to scale and profitability in the crowded robo-advisors space was a critical challenge. The case closes with the founders contemplating expanding or migrating their model from B2C to B2B in order to achieve scale and profitability faster. The case is an opportunity to discuss the theoretical underpinning of creating impact in public markets, to explore how portfolio performance might be affected by Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) screens, and to understand drivers of demand for impacting investing more broadly. The case also explores the challenges the founders face when aiming to design a new product to meet an emerging need and which distribution channel to choose for doing so.