Rumors had been circulating that new investors were sniffing around secure messaging firm Symphony. Today, the company made it official as they announced the closing of a $100 million round that included Google Inc., Lakestar, Natixis, Societe Generale and UBS. Among these names, Google had been most recently linked to Symphony. SocGen and UBS also make sense as they add to the list of 13 banks and financial firms that created a consortium and invested $66 million in Symphony last October.
With their product launching last month, Symphony is aiming to unbundle the process that firms subscribe to financial tools such as market data, cross broker messaging and analysis solutions. First on their list is their messaging platform which is being marketed as meeting Compliance and security requirements and as being available for both intra and cross-firm communication. With the large array of firms backing the product, Symphony’s messaging platform is often referred to as a Bloomberg Terminal due to its substantially lower costs.
Beyond messaging, Symphony is also working with third parties to allow their customers to subscribe to individual financial tools, rather than paying monthly fees for bundled terminals.
Commenting on the funding on their blog, Symphony CEO David Gurle expressed several reasons that they have garnered such quick traction from investors. Among them include their “unique architectural approach”, which is a Cloud based system in which the “encryption infrastructure is owned and operated by customers”. He explained that this allows the platform to be built to meet the needs of regulatory compliance requirements.
According to Gurle, Symphony currently has 40,000 users from 100 countries (although a large percentage of the user base had been part of their beta project). He added that they have booked over $10 million in service orders “in just a few months”.
Gurle explained that the funding is more than they expected to raise and “gives us the runway to stay focused on our vision of becoming the standard for business communications and allow us to accelerate our growth globally”. With the funding, Symphony expects to increase their product development and sales team.
