A FinTech platform that provides retail investors with access to public markets has raised £140 million in Series C investment.
London-based PrimaryBid allows issuers to include their stakeholders and communities in IPOs and subsequent capital market transactions alongside institutional investors.
The platform was used for a number of high-profile IPOs in 2021, including Deliveroo, PensionBee and the US IPO of MCG Group (Soho House), which used PrimaryBid to provide access to its UK members.
Molten Ventures, one of the venture capital firms participating in the round, used the PrimaryBid platform to allow retail investors to participate in its £111m raise in June 2021.
Since its $50m Series B funding round in October 2020, which Molten also participated in, PrimaryBid has become fully regulated in the EU, launched alongside Euronext in France in June 2021 and helped hundreds of thousands of individual investors participate in capital market transactions. In the past 18 months, over 150 follow-on and IPO transactions have listed on the platform in the UK.
Proceeds from the round will be used to expand PrimaryBid’s offering across continental Europe, leveraging strategic partnerships with ABN AMRO and Euronext, as well as launch in new regions including the USA.
The round was led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 alongside several existing investors.
“Our ambition is to democratise public market offerings through a combination of technology, data and advocacy,” said Anand Sambasivan, CEO and co-founder.
“Our platform deepens the relationships public companies have with their stakeholders and helps them make their equity and debt offerings more inclusive.
“We are proud to welcome SoftBank to our ownership and thank our existing investors for their continued support.”
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Vinoth Jayakumar, partner at Molten Ventures, added: “Primary Bid and Molten have strong shared goals. We listed on the public markets in 2016 to democratise access to the VC asset class, PrimaryBid is facilitating democratisation of the public markets in itself.
“It has shown fantastic commercial traction owing to its ability to solve problems that have blighted the capital markets for decades: PrimaryBid is the first to bring the technology and the buy-in from market participants to build infrastructure software.
“It has won the hearts and minds of the stock exchanges and facilitators such as investment banks and law firms. We are delighted to be able to continue backing PrimaryBid as it revolutionises a market that has for too long been stale.”