Clear Street valued at $1.7 billion as NY prime broker completes Series B funding round
The company offers top-notch brokerage services, including clearing and custody.
Clear Street has completed its Series B funding round led by Prysm Capital, with additional investors including NextGen Venture Partners, Walleye Capital, Belvedere, NEAR Foundation, McLaren Strategic Ventures and Validus Growth Investors.
Angel investors Illia Polosukhin (founder of NEAR), Moses Lo (founder of Xendit) and Alastair Trueger (Event Horizon Ventures) also took a stake in Clear Street.
The fundraising is Clear Street’s first venture capital round since its inception and brings its valuation to $1.7 billion, with the leading brokerage currently processing more than $3 billion in daily trading volume.
Since the start of 2021, Clear Street has seen a 220% increase in funding balances and a 510% growth in equity trading volume, the company said.
Clear Street was founded in 2018 as a premier brokerage platform for institutional investors. With this additional capital, Clear Street will be able to expand its capabilities to serve fintechs, market makers and professional traders.
Over the past 12 months, Clear Street has expanded its management team across all business areas and built a team of nearly 100 engineers to support product development and meet customer demand.
This additional capital will help the company continue to grow its team, resources and form new partnerships to achieve its goal of improving access to capital markets. Piper Sandler & Co. served as financial advisor for the transaction.
Chris Pento, co-founder and chief executive of Clear Street, said. “We founded Clear Street to replace the outdated technology infrastructure used in capital markets. It shouldn’t take six months to open an account or a year to start trading a new asset class. Clients are demanding better technology and better service. Clear Street is mobilizing to tackle this issue head-on. Our cloud-native platform provides the services and data investors need to compete in today’s markets.”
Sachin Kumar, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, said, “We started with prime brokerage, an area where we had experienced the frustrations of using outdated technology. As we have developed premium services, we have realized that 80-90% of the infrastructure used to serve prime brokerage clients is the same infrastructure used by other market players, such as fintech app developers or market makers. We have been heavily focused on building API-centric platforms such as clearing, settlement and custody so that we can scale to other parts of the market. »
Matt Roberts, co-founder and partner at Prysm Capital, added: “Capital markets lag behind in innovation and often rely on outdated technologies that make markets difficult and expensive to access. Under Chris and Sachin’s leadership, Clear Street has built a cutting-edge platform that rivals established street players. We are proud to partner with the team to expand their offerings and improve access to government markets.
The company offers top-notch brokerage services, including clearing and custody. The company is located in New York, New York, United States.