Rodrigo Niño

Rodrigo Nino, CEO and founder of Prodigy Network, is revolutionizing both the commercial real estate and crowdfunding industries by being the first to meld the two worlds in the United States.

A Colombian native and a Manhattan resident, Nino has proven Prodigy Network’s crowdfunding model as an efficient and secure mechanism that enables individuals from around the world to invest in specific projects that were solely accessible to the very wealthy before.

With this model, Nino has raised more than $410 million from 6,500 investors (from 26 countries and 27 US states) and is currently developing commercial real estate projects in Bogota and Manhattan with a projected value of more than $750 million. Major money center banks like Deutsche Bank, CIBC and Bank of America provided traditional financing for Prodigy’s Manhattan projects, giving further validation to Nino’s model.

Professor Karim Lakhani from Harvard Business School published a teaching case on Nino’s work titled, Prodigy Network: Democratizing Real Estate Design and Financing (http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=47056). Nino believes that crowdfunding will democratize commercial real estate by providing a new asset class for individuals, revolutionizing the industry.

Beyond commercial real estate, Nino believes the crowd can finance the solution of many of its own urban needs in cities for a profit. According to Nino, this shared value paradigm can level up the playing field for everyone. He sees "the World Economy evolving into a Crowd-Economy, where profit and positive impact are democratically lined up", thanks to technology and new legislation.

As proponent of the Crowd-Economy as the main tool against inequality, Nino has spoken at worldwide conferences and has been a noteworthy guest at NYU, MIT, Yale, Harvard University and the AEDES gallery in Berlin. Nino is often featured in leading publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Businessweek, Forbes, The Economist, The New York Times and Fast Company amongst others.