UK FinTech has gone from strength to strength over the past few years. Now, despite the shadow of Brexit, yet another venture has raised a big round.
Freetrade is a British challenger stockbroker that offers commission-free investing. Having just nabbed $15m in a new Series A round, it plans to scale the venture further. It also plans to boost its marketing efforts.
Draper Esprit, the venture capital firm that has previously supported the growth of payments-as-a-service startup Form3, participated in Freetrade latest investment, injecting $7.5m into the stockbroker challenger, according to TechCrunch.
?Freetrade are on a mission to open up investment opportunities for everyone, as are we,said Simon Cook, CEO of Draper Esprit, in a statement. ?In this sense, their mission is totally aligned with our own, as a rare tech-focused VC listed on the stock exchange.
?The company have shown exceptional growth in the short time since they first launched the platform last year. We could not be more delighted to support?[the founders] and their wider team as they enable Europe 100 million millennials to benefit from the world economic growth.p>
The stockbrocking app has previously amazed an impressive $1.1m in just 12 days through crowdfunding platform Crowdcube in 2017.
While it has long been reasonably isolated in the UK, it may soon face more competition with American competitor Robinhood having made moves to set up shop in Bligthy.
Moreover, there are signs that more FinTech enterprises are moving into the space across the world.
Square, the FinTech scalup launched by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, is reportedly also moving into stock-trading and one of Y-Combinator more recent batches included several startups looking to set up similar services across the globe.
Freetrade has managed to raise the new funds despite the ongoing Brexit saga, which has left several companies wondering whether or not the UK can remain a FinTech hotbed after the divorce from the EU.
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