New York City-based Clear Street is helping fuel the tech revolution by improving access to capital markets for all market participants, including traders, institutions, market makers and fintech companies.
On Tuesday, Clear Street announced that it raised a $165 million Series B round at a valuation of $1.7 billion. The round was led by Prysm Capital, a growth equity firm that focuses on tech, consumer and healthcare companies. Several other VCs also participated in the round including, NextGen Venture Partners, Walleye Captial and Belvedere, among others.
Founded in 2018, Clear Street is building modern infrastructure to improve access to capital markets. The current technology operating across the capital markets was built in the 1970s and 80s and hasn’t seen any real innovation since, according to Clear Street. This outdated infrastructure makes markets difficult and expensive to access. Clear Street’s cloud-native, tech-first platform is working to fix that.
“We founded Clear Street to replace the outdated tech infrastructure being used across capital markets,” Chris Pento, co-founder and CEO of Clear Street, said in a statement. “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.”
The fintech startup began its journey as a prime brokerage platform offering professional traders and institutions access to execution, financing, clearing and custody for U.S. equities and options. With its fresh capital, Clear Street plans to expand its platform offering to new investor types, geographies and asset classes, according to the company.
Prior to the Series B raise, Clear Street secured two debt financing investments totaling $135 million between December of 2020 and July of 2021, according to Crunchbase.
Since the beginning of 2021, Clear Street witnessed tremendous growth in its services. According to the company, equity transactional volume increased by 510 percent and financing balances went up by 220 percent. As a result, the company was processing more than $3 billion in trading volume per day. To keep up, Clear Street built up its engineering team to over 100 employees.
Clear Street will continue to grow its team with this Series B round and currently has several openings listed on Built In.
