DB1 Ventures

Founder/CEO: Rebeca Minguela
Headquarters: New York, USA
Type of business: impact and ESG technology platform

Clarity AI is a global fintech company that empowers investors to manage the impact of their portfolios through a proprietary technology platform that leverages big data and machine learning to assess sustainability for all societal stakeholders.

The company has built the most reliable tech platform on social and environmental impact, featuring more than 30,000 companies, 198 countries, 187 local governments and over 200,000 funds. Clarity AI uses proprietary technology and algorithms to produce transparent assessments for investors that are the most consistent and comprehensive available.

Further information

• Website: Clarity AI
• Links: Clarity AI Raises $15m to Fuel Expansion of Platform
  

Founders: Stuart McHardy, Edward Boggis-Rolfe, Andy Davies
CEO: Stuart Connolly
Headquarters: London, UK
Type of business: cloud-based collateral management solution provider

CloudMargin created the world's first cloud-based collateral management workflow tool, which has earned 20 industry awards and honours since 2015 for innovation and best-in-class technology.

The firm's Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model is helping many of the leading sell-side and buy-side financial institutions globally – including brokerage firms, banks, asset management firms, pension funds and insurance companies – as well as outsourcers and other technology firms meet time-critical regulatory deadlines and reduce costs associated with collateral requirements that are growing dramatically.

Further information

• Website: CloudMargin
• Links: CloudMargin Raises $15 Million in Series B Funding Round

• Finastra and CloudMargin partner to deliver Collateral Management as a Service

Founders: Sunil Hirani, Don Wilson
CEO: Yuval Rooz
Headquarters: New York, USA
Type of business: distributed ledger platform and service provider

The Digital Asset platform delivers flexible infrastructure to share processes and data securely, on a need-to-know basis, without the need for reconciliation. It combines a permissioned distributed ledger with a powerful financial modeling language, DAML, to ensure that each institution operates from a single source of truth. The company employs more than 150 people in six cities worldwide and serves global clients such as ASX and DTCC.

Further information

• Website: Digital Assets Holding

Founders/managing partners: Dr Patrick Beitel, Dr Thomas Jetter, Dr Axel Krieger, Dr Dirk Schmuecking
Headquarters: Munich and Frankfurt, Germany
Type of business: growth equity investor focused on B2B technology companies

Digital+ Partners is a growth equity investor focusing on fintech and industrial technology sectors – in Germany and abroad. Digital+ Partners plays an active role in the digital transformation of the broader industrial and financial technology ecosystems, providing growth capital and scale-up support in rapidly growing technology companies with proven products differentiated by software, data analytics and B2B online enablement.

Further information

• Website: Digital+ Partners

Founder/CEO:  Ramin Niroumand
Headquarters: Berlin, Germany
Type of business: fintech company builder

finleap is Europe’s leading fintech ecosystem, based in Berlin with offices in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Milan, Madrid and Paris. finleap builds stand-alone fintech companies for the banking, insurance and asset management industries and manages them actively for scaling up. As well, it offers fintech SaaS solutions to various enterprises.

It has already developed 19 ventures with its infrastructure and added others by acquisition to its ecosystem. These include companies such as solarisBank, the technology platform with a banking license, ELEMENT, a fully digital insurer, and PAIR Finance, a provider of data-based receivables management.

Further information

• Website: finleap

Founders: Sohail Prasad, Samvit Ramadurgam, Gil Silberman
CEO: Kelly Rodriques
Offices: San Francisco, USA
Type of business: global private securities marketplace

Forge Global (formerly named “Equidate”) is a trading platform for private company shares that recently expanded its value proposition into custody and data. It is aiming to build a one-stop-shop infrastructure ecosystem in the private market that serves issuers, shareholders and accredited investors.

Further information

• Website: Forge Global

• Links: Forge and SharesPost Join Forces

Company: spin-off from LuxSE
CEO: Olivier Portenseigne
Headquarters: Luxembourg
Type of business: decentralized platform facilitating investment fund distribution

FundsDLT is a decentralized platform based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) that enables the reengineering of the investment fund distribution value chain, from front to back, covering the entire fund lifecycle.

FundsDLT is being developed to enable asset managers, distributors, and their service providers, to mutualize operational costs, reduce time to process transactions, share client knowledge amongst themselves, improve client experience and implement new distribution channels.

The Company will streamline a range of fund administration and transaction related tasks by using blockchain to automate several processes in a secure and scalable manner. The model is applicable to a wide range of funds and does not depend on the jurisdiction.

Further information

• Website: FundsDLT
• Links: FundsDLT closes Series A funding
• Financial institutions team up to develop FundsDLT

Founders: Guido Stroemer, Olly Benkert
Headquarters: Luxembourg
Type of business: collateral lending solution utilising distributed ledger technology

HQLA^x is a financial technology innovation firm that specialises in delivering liquidity management and collateral management solutions for institutional clients in the global securities lending and repo markets. Utilising distributed ledger technology, HQLA^x addresses the heightened need for a marketplace to facilitate large scale and cost efficient collateral transfers across the global financial ecosystem by providing improved collateral fluidity with an operating model that allows for transferring of title and does not require securities to be moved across CSDs.

Further information

• Website: HQLA^x
• Blog: “What Oktoberfest has in common with our HQLAx stake”

Founders/managing partners: Mark Beeston, Mark Whitcroft
Headquarters: London, UK
Type of business: venture capital firm focused on the capital markets fintech space

Illuminate Financial was founded in 2014 and has a global investment mandate, exclusively focused on capital markets financial technology. The company invests in late seed and series A stage companies. The fund brings together investors, entrepreneurs and financial institutions to foster the adoption of new technology that addresses critical business needs. Its operating model includes strategic partnership with banks, buy-side firms and strategic investors.

Further information

• Website: Illuminate Financial 

Founders: Raja Palaniappan, Robert Taylor
CEO: Raja Palaniappan
Headquarters: London, UK
Type of business: digital issuance platform for global debt capital markets

Origin is a leading player in the digitization of debt capital markets, helping dealers and issuers streamline the issuance process from start to finish.

The platform currently counts over 90 issuers and 20 dealers as clients, including some of the largest participants in the international capital markets. The company has developed three products that aim to automate the debt issuance process: their Marketplace, Documentation and Post-Trade modules.

Further information

• Website: OriginMarkets
• Links: Origin raises Series A financing, led by Clearstream and the Luxembourg Stock Exchange
  

Founders: Dean Little, Jonathan Smalley
CEO: Dean Little
Headquarters: London, UK
Type of business: digital investor communications platform

Proxymity’s services include a proxy-voting platform, which provides post-meeting vote confirmation and gives investors up to nine more days per meeting to research and vote. Its algorithm ensures real-time and fully transparent transmission of data.

Proxymity also offers a shareholder disclosure platform which automates shareholder ID requests in industry-compliant formats without need for any manual handling to support issuers and intermediaries with their SRD II compliance concerns.

Further information

• Website: Proxymity
• Links: Proxymity launches consortium of financial industry leaders
• Video: Proxy Voting for a Connected World

Founders: Joe Hellerstein, Sean Kandel and Jeffrey Heer
CEO: Adam Wilson
Headquarters: San Francisco, USA
Type of business: big data and analytics

Trifacta is the industry pioneer and established leader of the global market for data preparation technology. The company draws on decades of academic research to make the process of preparing data faster and more intuitive. More than 50,000 data wranglers in 10,000 companies worldwide use Trifacta solutions across cloud, hybrid and on-premises environments. Leading organisations such as Deutsche Börse, Google, Kaiser Permanente, New York Life and PepsiCo count on Trifacta to accelerate time-to-insight and discover opportunities that drive success.

Further information

• Website: Trifacta
• Video: Data wrangling for faster, more accurate analysis

Founder/CEO: Ronald Mateo
Headquarters: New York, USA
Type of business: fixed-income electronic trading solution

Trumid, a FINRA-registered broker dealer, provides an electronic credit trading and market intelligence platform designed to unlock liquidity for institutional clients. The company’s platform allows users to transact directly with other buy-side and sell-side participants, collectively determine pricing in a transparent way and execute a transaction at the market-vetted price. Trumid’s products leverage the network effect and data science to empower all market participants to make more informed decisions.

Further information

• Website: Trumid
• Blog: “Investing in the future: how collaboration between incumbents and fintechs fosters growth”
• Trumid Announces New Growth Investment to Support Rapid Expansion