Prysm Capital, a growth equity firm, has led a $165m Series B round in Clear Street, a financial technology company, to accelerate its platform launch.
Additional investors included NextGen Venture Partners, Walleye Capital, Belvedere, NEAR Foundation, McLaren Strategic Ventures, and Validus Growth Investors, as well as angel investors, Illia Polosukhin (founder of NEAR), Moses Lo (founder of Xendit), and Alastair Trueger (Event Horizon Ventures).
Launched in 2018, Clear Street’s mission is to build better infrastructure to improve market access for all participants.
The firm started with 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.
“Capital markets are lagging in innovation and often rely on antiquated technologies that make markets difficult and expensive to access,” said Matt Roberts, Co-Founder & Partner at Prysm Capital.
“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,” he said.
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.
The Series B round marks Clear Street’s first venture capital raise since inception and brings its valuation to $1.7 billion.
Since the beginning of 2021, Clear Street experienced a 220% increase in financing balances, and 510% growth in equity transactional volume. Today, Clear Street’s architecture processes more than $3bn in daily trading volume.
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.
“We founded Clear Street to replace the outdated tech infrastructure being used across capital markets,” said Chris Pento, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Clear Street.
“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, added: “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,” he said.
