The new funding was reported to up Symphony’s value to $650m.
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The company has attracted a good deal of attention from Wall Street’s biggest players because the service could allow them to wean themselves from Bloomberg’s $24,000-a-year terminal, on whose chat and instant-messaging services traders rely to trade stocks and bonds.
So what is it about Symphony that it has investors clamoring at its door to seed it with capital?
Symphony’s roster of new and existing investors includes: Bank of America (NYSE:BAC), Blackrock (NYSE:BLK), BNY Mellon (NYSE:BNY), Citadel, Citigroup (NYSE:C), Credit Suisse (NYSE:CS), Deutsche Bank (NYSE:DB), Alphabet’s Google, Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS), HSBC (), JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM), Jefferies, Lakestar, Maverick, Merus Capital, Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS), Natixis, Nomura (NYSE:NMR), Societe Generale, UBS (NYSE:UBS) and Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC).
Symphony’s emerging product came in the crosshairs of regulators earlier this year when the New York State Department of Financial Services questioned whether a feature promising “guaranteed data deletion” would hinder Wall Street regulatory investigations.
“This financing is a vote of confidence in Symphony’s value proposition and benefits to business users”, David Gurle, Symphony’s founder and chief executive officer, said in the statement. Symphony’s platform could one day integrate with Google’s own work-based applications, such as its documents, spreadsheets or Google Finance. The startup says its cloud-based messaging platform is meant for highly regulated businesses that have compliance needs. The business service costs $15 per user, per month.
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Despite its initial focus on financial service companies, Symphony is clearly looking to expand into other industries, hence the involvement of Google in this latest round.
