Can’t Afford a Vintage Ferrari? How About Buying a Share for $80

Rally Rd. isn't your typical Manhattan investment firm. Its 15 or so employees slouch in T-shirts and baseball caps in front of their computers. Framed photos of vintage Mercedes-Benz models – oversized for the narrow office – adorn the white walls and hanging gardens are due to arrive shortly in the mail.

Another thing that sets them apart: The people at Rally aren't picking stocks and bonds. They're looking for mint-condition antique cars.

Rally Rd.'s smartphone app, launched for iOS in late 2017, allows individual investors to buy shares in luxury and collectible vehicles. After swiping through glossy images on the app, a stake in your dream car can be had for as little as $38.80. The total prices, or "market caps," of the cars range from $77,000 for a 1977 Lotus Esprit S1 to $495,000 for a 1993 Jaguar XJ220 – sums that, if purchased in full, would be out of reach for many lay investors.

"It just wasn't legally and technologically possible to invest in these alternative asset classes previously," says Chief Financial Officer Max Niederste-Ostholt. "We'd all been thinking about it for a long time and thought, when can we get into these asset classes without having a whole warehouse to store cars?"

Rally Rd.'s founders, all in their 30s, include Chief Executive Officer Christopher Bruno, Chief Product Officer Rob Petrozzo and Niederste-Ostholt – who previously worked for Barclays Plc. Bruno came from a family of mechanics and "understood the asset class from the ground up," says Petrozzo, who had a scale model of the exact Jaguar XJ220 featured on Rally Rd. when he was 8 years old. Their mission is to democratize collector car investment.