On 15 September, Symphony has launched its first product Secure Messaging application.
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The other investors revealed Monday, all European, are Lakestar, Natixis, Societe Generale and UBS. The Wall Street Journal, citing sources familiar with the matter, reported last week that the new round of funding would value Symphony at about $650 million. CEO David Gurle said in a blog post on the company website. Goldman Sachs Group led a group of 14 banks including Bank of America Corp, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase & Co in making a $66 million investment in Symphony last October, when Symphony was set up. According to Gurle, this second round focuses on expanding beyond the financial services roots for Symphony.
The platform, meant to be both secretive and automatically compliant with Wall Street rules, is designed not just for employees at big financial institutions but also the accounting and legal firms and market data providers that work with them.
Symphony’s funding round comes a month after the company, as well as four banks, agreed to beef up its paper trail so regulators can keep tabs on bankers without tipping them off. (NASDAQ:NWSA)-owned Dow Jones, McGraw-Hill Financial (NYSE:MHFI) – which owns Standard & Poor’s – and Selerity, is poised to compete with terminals from the likes of Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg. Symphony’s platform competed with other business communication tools such as Slack and Skype for Business by Microsoft. Google’s struggles in social media has been well documented, with the relative failure of Google+, and that could be why the company is looking outward for investment opportunities in the space. Among those names, Google had been most recently linked to Symphony.
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So what is it about Symphony that it has investors clamoring at its door to seed it with capital?
