Deutsche Börse’s DB1 Ventures leads Series B funding round in WeMatch
As part of their $19.5 million Series B equity funding round, Deutsche Börse’s DB1 Ventures has acquired a minority stake in WeMatch, a fintech company digitizing the wholesale derivatives industry. The deal closed on 30 September 2021.
Other investors in the funding round included Augmentum Fintech PLC, Illuminate Financial and existing shareholder J.P. Morgan.
WeMatch develops web-based solutions to replace voice broking by automating matching, negotiation and lifecycle management for instruments such as securities borrowing and lending, total return swaps, interest rate derivatives, as well as equity derivatives. It provides market participants with a one-stop solution across a range of assets, cutting costs for clients, increasing efficiency and reducing conduct risk for traders.
The investors believe in the enormous potential for WeMatch to help the capital market industry in further adopting digital solutions across multiple markets globally, and to apply this technology to internal and client-facing solutions.
“The digitalization of workflows combined with seamless access to large liquidity pools at market infrastructure providers has been driving the collaboration between WeMatch and Deutsche Börse; hence, this investment makes perfect sense and further strengthens our partnership.” says Matthias Graulich, Member of the Eurex Clearing Executive Board at Deutsche Börse. “It is a win-win from our perspective – Deutsche Börse will benefit from WeMatch’s agility and innovation power, and WeMatch will benefit from our deep liquidity pools and strong global distribution power facilitating further growth for both firms.”
“We are thrilled to have completed this Series B and to welcome DB1 Ventures, Illuminate Financial, and Augmentum Fintech PLC as new investors, in addition to receiving the continued support from our existing shareholders,” says Joseph Seroussi, WeMatch co-CEO.
“The combination of the significant synergies with a leading European exchange like Deutsche Börse, the continued support of our banking partners J.P. Morgan and Société Générale, and the contribution of impactful Fintech VCs like Illuminate Financial and Augmentum, will help us deliver our project to digitize capital market workflows on a global scale for both sell-side and buy-side Institutions.”
WeMatch was founded in 2016 by a team of five, with dealing and brokerage backgrounds, and currently has 26 employees across offices in Tel Aviv, London, and Paris. So far, 40 banks and 17 fund managers have been onboarded, with a notional of over USD 1 trillion matched to date.