Munivestor, an online financial marketplace, is set to launch this summer with the aim of improving municipal governments’ access to capital by allowing them to raise funds directly from investors.
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“Municipal finance hasn’t kept pace with the capital needs of American cities,” said Damon Burns, founder and CEO of Munivestor. “The traditional model works for large issuers, but the majority of municipalities need something different — lower costs, broader investor access, and a transparent process.”
The platform allows municipalities to issue bonds directly to investors of all sizes, including the untapped retail market. By digitizing the process, access is created for investors who do not fit into the traditional order process available to municipalities, he said.
The platform focuses on deals of $50 million or less, which can have a harder time accessing capital and securing the right “investor mix,” Burns noted.
While active transactions have not started yet, Munivestor has gotten commitments from three municipalities — the first wave of issuers that will move through the system as it goes fully operational this summer — to initiate the bond issuance process through its platform.
Through the Munivestor platform, clients enter basic information about the municipality to the platform, which includes the history, financial data, key personnel and other criteria, and that is added to the issuer storefront, he said.
Once the storefront is created and made available to investors, the issuer can create bond issues. When the deal is ready to go to market, it goes through a 30-day marketing period, he said.
At the end of that time, pre-orders are aggregated and automatically populated once the order period opens. Once the five-day order period closes, the bids are aggregated on the system. From there, there’s a sign-off process with the issuer, followed by closing, according to Burns.
“We see this as the future of municipal finance … which is more digital engagement, more transparency and more flexibility in terms of structuring deals or creating access to certain deals that wouldn’t have been able to get financed before,” Burns said.
Burns started the company 15 years ago but relaunched in 2023. Since then, the company has been cultivating relationships, rebuilding the technology, identifying pilot customers, and finding necessary partnerships to bring a digital bond deal to market, he said.
One such partnership is an integration with the United Kingdom-based fintech Ownera’s SuperApps Platform, which gives municipalities direct access to a global network of institutional investors.
The physical infrastructure of the integration is under development. Full operation is anticipated this summer.
This partnership — which was born of Munivestor’s search for a partner on the digital asset infrastructure side to help the company access institutional investors — creates more liquidity and a wider safety net for issuers, Burns said.
“Munivestor demonstrates the breadth of what the SuperApps Platform is designed to enable,” said Ami Ben David, founder and CEO of Ownera, in a statement. “This isn’t just another asset class on the network — it’s proof that institutional-grade tokenization infrastructure can serve markets that traditional models have underserved for decades. Every SuperApp deployed on the platform expands the opportunity set for every participant already connected. That’s the network effect we’re building.”