Clear Street valued at $1.7 billion as NY prime broker completes Series B funding round
The company offers prime 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 fundraiser is Clear Street’s first venture capital raise since inception and brings its valuation to $1.7 billion as the prime brokerage currently processes more than $3 billion in daily trading volume.
Since the beginning of 2021, Clear Street experienced a 220% increase in financing balances, and 510% growth in equity transactional volume, the firm stated.
Clear Street was founded in 2018 as a prime 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 leadership team across business areas and built a team of nearly 100 engineers to support product development and meet client demand.
This additional capital will help the firm continue to grow its team, resources, and form new partnerships to meet its goal of improving access across the capital markets. Piper Sandler & Co. served as the financial advisor on the transaction.
Chris Pento, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Clear Street, said. “We founded Clear Street to replace the outdated tech infrastructure being used across capital markets. It shouldn’t take six months to open an account or a year to begin trading a new asset class. Clients are demanding better technology and better service. Clear Street is stepping up to address this issue head-on. Our cloud-native platform provides the services and data that investors need to compete in today’s markets.”
Sachin Kumar, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, commented: “We started with prime brokerage, an area where we had experienced the frustrations caused by operating on outdated technology first-hand. As we built out prime services, we realized that 80% to 90% of the infrastructure used to service prime brokerage customers is the same infrastructure used by other market participants, like fintech app developers or market-makers. We’ve focused heavily on creating platforms that are API-first, such as clearing, settlement and custody, so that we can scale to other parts of the market.”
Matt Roberts, Co-Founder & Partner at Prysm Capital, added: “Capital markets are lagging in innovation and often rely on antiquated technologies that make markets difficult and expensive to access. Under the leadership of Chris and Sachin, Clear Street has built a cutting-edge platform that competes with established players on the street. We are proud to partner with the team to expand their offerings and improve access to public markets.”
The company offers prime brokerage services, including clearing and custody. The firm is located in New York, New York, United States.
