DriveWealth, a fintech startup that aims to democratize the investment space, announced Friday it raised $450 million in fresh Series D funding. The round was co-led by venture capital giants Insight Partners and Accel, and brings the nine-year-old company’s valuation to $2.85 billion.
According to DriveWealth, the future of investing is “fractional, transactional and mobile,” and should be accessible and easy for everyone regardless of their age, wealth or financial expertise. To make that happen, the company offers a cloud-based, API-driven brokerage platform that powers anything from trading to investing to retirement in real-time fractional shares — this allows investors to buy a slice of a share instead of the entire thing.
The goal, says DriveWealth, is to imbed investing into everyday customer activities, allowing these customers to become investors in some of the world’s top companies with as little as $1.
This news is coming at a time when public interest in the stock market has been skyrocketing, fueled by a trading frenzy focused on GameStop and other “meme” stocks. This has led to the rapid success of DriveWealth and other similar companies, including Public and Robinhood.
“The proliferation of digital wallets and democratization of investing has led to DriveWealth’s incredible growth and user adaptation to date, and the company’s institutional-grade brokerage execution delivers a seamless process to access equities globally,” Deven Parekh, a managing director at Insight Partners, said in a statement. “We look forward to partnering with the company as they continue to expand to meet the needs of today, and innovate for the demands of tomorrow’s fintech ecosystem.”
This fresh capital will be used to further innovate DriveWealth’s platform and fuel its global expansion as it works to become “world-class, exchange-like” company that “powers tomorrow’s investing productions,” says founder and CEO Bob Cortright.
“We are in the early innings of a worldwide retail investing revolution,” Cortright said in a statement. “Our goal is for DriveWealth to be the partner of choice to deliver the embedded investing experience of the future.”
Indeed, DriveWealth was recently named one of Built In’s 21 New York-area companies to watch in 2021, and appears to be in the midst of a hiring spree, with dozens of open tech positions at its Chatham, New Jersey, headquarters.
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