New York-based independent prime broker Clear Street announced on Tuesday it secured a $270 million investment from Prysm Capital, a growth equity firm. This is the second part of a $435 million Series B round and values Clear Street at $2 billion, according to a company statement.
Founded in 2018, Clear Street is building modern infrastructure for capital markets, making it easier for market participants to access capital markets. Its goal is to create a single platform that serves all investor types, across all asset classes on a global scale. To this end, the company has built a proprietary, cloud-native system to replace the “legacy infrastructure” currently used across capital markets, the company said in the statement. Clear Street’s first tool is an equity finance platform that processes more than $10 billion in trades every day, according to the company.
The fresh funding will be used to expand Clear Street across new markets and asset classes, accelerate its product offerings and increase availability to all market participants. According to Clear Street, this investment was supported by a diverse institutional investor base, including public pension funds and endowments.
In the past year, the number of institutional clients using Clear Street’s platform increased by 500 percent and the company’s daily transactional volume increased by more than 300 percent, Clear Street co-founder and CEO Chris Pento said in a statement.
In addition, Clear Street launched capital introduction and repurchase agreement offerings, furthered its securities lending capabilities and revamped its client-facing portals related to risk, operations and reporting. The company also added to its sales and engineering teams and welcomed Wall Street industry veterans last year.
Clear Street, which became a tech unicorn last year, is actively hiring for a dozen positions spanning its engineering, operations, finance and HR teams.
