Sixty-four teams. Six rounds of voting. And one ultimate Cincy Inno Madness champion.
Meet this year’s winner: Akru.
The fintech takes the title in our month-long bracket-style competition after defeating Lerch, a mobile event app, head-to-head in the finals, with a whopping 74% of the vote.
In total, more than 2,600 votes were cast in the finals, bringing the total tally in the contest to 10,600-plus.
Readers voted to advance companies based on one question: Who would you invest in? Akru joins past Inno Madness winners — TinnCann, Sense Neuro Diagnostics and Navistone — and earns the prize of bragging rights for an entire year. The goal of Inno Madness is to offer a glimpse of some of the companies working in the innovation space in the region.
Akru, formerly known as Tokenism, was founded in 2018 to democratize commercial real estate investments.
The company’s blockchain-based platform allows for fractionalized commercial real estate investing — breaking down a property’s value into “tokens” that can then be purchased by investors, creating a lower barrier to entry since the buyers are only purchasing a portion of a property.
The startup has received backing from a number of venture capital firms, including Southern California-based Draper Goren Holm, a venture studio focused on blockchain startups.
The company has been on a recent hot streak. It recently announced plans to raise a $5 million Series A this summer; half of which is being committed by Cincinnati legacy venture capitalist Jack Wyant.
Akru has roughly $380 million worth of properties in its pipeline now, but by years-end, that's expected to hit $1.1 billion, founder and CEO Mohsin Masud said.
