A trading app, which is one of the most innovative products in the industry last year, is set to continue the rollout of its platform across Europe after securing an additional round if financing. The company which develops the "casual" trading app has announced that it raised $1.9 million to accelerate the European roll-out of the product.
Last year BUX launched its mobile application which is offering a gamified version of trading with some appropriate risk-taking controls, which are making investing for novice traders much easier and certainly less risky than 1:100 Leverage .
The new investment comes from London and Silicon Valley based VC Initial Capital, which is normally investing in games. This is the second financing round for BUX, as it looks to accelerate its already impressive growth figures.
A story of rapid growth: 200,000 users in 12 months in 2 countries
Since launching about 12 months ago BUX has already on-boarded more than 200,000 users in the UK and the Netherlands, which are the only two countries where the product is available so far. The most impressive figure in these numbers is that according to stats provided by the firm, 79 percent of BUX users respond that they have little to no earlier trading experience.
The gamification technique used by BUX to introduce financial markets trading to a new audience has actually made Initial Capital, a VC which is normally interested in games, to make a choice to diversify and provide the bulk of the funding for new markets expansion. The investors have already helped some fast growth gaming companies like Space Ape, Super Evil Mega Corp and Supercell.
The founder and partner of Initial Capital, Shukri Shammas, shared in the announcement, “Making stock trading more accessible through gamification isn’t easy. You need a unique team, consisting of members that don’t naturally find themselves working within each other’s vicinities: people with experience in brokerage and people who are into games."
"BUX has managed to build such a team. Because of this, and the traction that BUX has shown after just a year, we are genuinely excited to be involved with BUX turning the traditional brokerage sector upside down,” he explained.
The CEO of BUX, Nick Bortot added, “BUX is the result of a cross pollination between two different sectors: games and trading, which is an excellent starting point for radical innovation. I’m thrilled that as a Fintech company, we can now draw on the knowledge of one of the leading VC’s in the games sector.”
Other investors that took part in this financing round are fintech focused VC Velocity Capital and VC 5Square. Fintech VC Orange Growth Capital and BUX’s founders funded the first financing round.
