INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Fueled by last year greed-inducing visions of a cryptocurrency boom and a stock market largely untethered from classical economics,
TradingView, a developer of social networking and data analysis tools for financial markets, has raised millions in new venture funding.
The
New York-based company just scored $37 million in funding led by the growth-stage investment firm Insight Venture Partners .
TradingView
has developed a proprietary, JavaScript-based programming language called PineScript, which lets anyone develop their own customized
The company &freemium& software as a service model that lets most users connect and exchange trading tips and tricks for free, but begins
charging when customers want access to more charts, data and real-time server-side alerts.
There are three payment plans beginning at $15,
with a mid-tier at $30 and a high-end $60 per-month premium option.
The company had previously boosted its growth by offering its charting
software for free to partner websites like SeekingAlpha, Bitfinex and the Nasdaq
That strategy helped it grow to 8 million monthly active users with around 61 percent coming from direct traffic as of March of this
year.
These days the company derives nearly 75 percent of its revenue from those monthly subscription plans to individual traders
TradingView executives think the company still has an opportunity to expand its footprint among those retail investors, but it also planning
to make a push to serve more institutional clients with its toolkit.
For the past seven years the company has enjoyed consistent growth,
according to TradingView co-founder and chief operations officer, Stan Bokov.
For Paul Szurek, a vice-president at Insight Venture Partners,
the investment in TradingView is building off of broad consumer interest in amateur speculative trading
Looking at RobinHood, Bux and eToro as gateways for new investors who eventually move on to more sophisticated tools, Szurek said that
TradingView was often their next step into market investing.
&The rise of cryptocurrencies… and trading those assets… has flywheeled
into a broader interest in investing across asset classes,& Szurek said.
While TradingView was never crypto-focused, according to Bokov, the
company was supportive from the beginning and it been a boon to the broader business
They stayed for the other stuff,& Bokov said.
And crypto might just be the gateway drug for younger speculative traders to start investing
in financial markets more broadly, according to Szurek
&October to January, during the real core of the crypto boom here, there were a lot of users coming in starting out researching that asset
Eighty percent move on to research other asset classes,& he said
&As TradingView kind of pushed through the [first quarter], trends in growth really diverged from what we were seeing in purely
crypto-focused business and that a testament to users leveraging this one-stop-shop component of the platform.&
Additional investors in the
new TradingView include DRW Venture Capital and Jump Capital
The company was a graduate of the 2013 Techstars Chicago batch and was seeded by Irish Angels, Techstars, iTech Capital and undisclosed
angel investors.
&TradingView was built for non-professional traders, but its accessible trading tools and powerful-yet-intuitive charting
capabilities have attracted the attention of institutional investors,& said Kimberly Trautmann, head of DRW Venture Capital, in a statement
&As an investor, we are excited about the diverse cross section of the industry that TradingView has reached and its rapid growth
As a proprietary trading firm on an institutional level, we&re looking forward to leveraging the platform and contributing to its further
