Clear Street hits $1.7bn valuation after first VC funding round

May 25, 2022

Clear Street, which claims to be building better access to capital markets, has scored a $165m Series B to accelerate the launch of its platform.

This investment, which values the business at $1.7bn, is the first venture capital fundraise since its inception.

Growth equity firm Prysm Capital served as the lead backer, with additional contributions coming from NextGen Venture Partners, Walleye Capital, Belvedere, NEAR Foundation, McLaren Strategic Ventures and Validus Growth Investors.

Several angel investors also joined the round, including NEAR founder Illia Polosukhin, Xendit founder Moses Lo and Event Horizon Ventures general partner Alastair Trueger.

With the capital, Clear Street hopes to expand its team and form new partnerships,

The FinTech company aims to build infrastructure that improves market access for all participants. Its cloud-native infrastructure support execution, real-time reporting, clearing and custody, capital introduction and client services.

In the future, the company hopes to expand across geographies, asset classes and become available to all market participants, including FinTechs, market makers and professional traders.

Clear Street co-founder and CTO Sachin Kumar said, “We started with prime brokerage, an area where we had experienced the frustrations caused by operating on outdated technology first-hand.

“As we built out prime services, we realized that 80% to 90% of the infrastructure used to service prime brokerage customers is the same infrastructure used by other market participants, like fintech app developers or market-makers. We’ve focused heavily on creating platforms that are API-first, such as clearing, settlement and custody, so that we can scale to other parts of the market.”

Since the start of 2021, Clear Street has seen a 220% increase to financing balances and a 510% growth in equity transactional volume. It claims to process over $3bn in daily trading volume.

Additionally, in the past 12 months, Clear Street has expanded its leadership team and built a team of around 100 engineers to support the product development.

Clear Street co-founder and CEO Chris Pento said, “We founded Clear Street to replace the outdated tech infrastructure being used across capital markets.

“It shouldn’t take six months to open an account or a year to begin trading a new asset class. Clients are demanding better technology and better service. Clear Street is stepping up to address this issue head-on. Our cloud-native platform provides the services and data that investors need to compete in today’s markets.”