Retail trading app BUX has closed a $12.5m funding round which was led by venture capital firms Velocity Capital and Holtzbrinck Ventures.
The investment round included debt financing from Kreos Capital, but it is unclear what the proportion of the funding this made up.
Proceeds from the round are being used to support its acquisition of online broker ayondo markets limited (AML), which is the back-end provider of BUX’s current trading app. Equity is also being used to support the launch of BUX’s new app STOCKS, which will enable Europeans to invest commission-fee from July 2019.
The STOCKS app has a waitlist of 100,000 and it aims to lower the barriers of entry for investing and empower Europeans to better take control of their financial futures. Services offered by STOCKS include zero-commission investing, simple user experience, simplified client on-boarding, hyper-localized content and community interactions.
Netherlands-based BUX is a mobile-based digital stock trading app, aimed towards first-time investors. The company helps to educate new investors, by putting them in a risk-free environment of the real market, before they can access the real platform.
BUX CEO and Founder Nick Bortot said, “This transaction gives BUX control over the full value chain including a full brokerage license, back-end technology and operations.”. “It will take away any external dependencies and allow us to serve our customers even better and make it easier to introduce new features more quickly. We will additionally add 50% to our future revenues, as we will keep servicing other clients of AML.”
Both the funding and the acquisition of AML will help the company boost its presence across Europe and explore new territories.
Velocity Capital investment partner Willem Willemstein said, “The future of investing is changing and BUX is uniquely positioned to shape the neo-brokerage space in Europe.
“The FinTechs that will succeed in this environment will be those who are able to specialise, localise and adapt to the varied cultural needs of the European landscape. BUX has a distinctive combination of experience scaling across Europe, combined with a vibrant lifestyle brand that will be unique to anything currently in the market.”
The capital round has brought BUX’s total funding efforts up to $35m.
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