ChartIQ Preps Growth Spurt, Product Expansion Following New Funding

Charlottesville, VA-based charting and analytics provider ChartIQ plans to double in size as a result of raising $17.4 million in a Series B funding round led by German private equity firm Digital+ Partners.

The Series B is ChartIQ’s largest cash infusion to date, having previously raised $1 million in seed funding from ValueStream Ventures, Social Leverage and Tribeca Angels, and a further $4 million in a Series A funding round led by Illuminate Financial with participation from the seed investors and Asia Fintech Angels. In addition to Digital+ Partners, the Series B round also included further investments from Illuminate, ValueStream and Social Leverage.

As a result of the new funding, Digital+ Partners MD and founding partner Patrick Beitel will join ChartIQ’s board of directors. Beitel founded Digital+ Partners in 2015 after 16 years at McKinsey & Co as a partner and co-head of the firm’s global market infrastructure practice. After founding Digital+ Partners, he served as a senior advisor to McKinsey for another two years.

“Patrick brings a tremendous amount of experience, both as an investor helping growth-stage companies expand, and from his 18 years at McKinsey. As we scale, grow globally, and look to address use cases in other industries, Patrick will be critical to how we plan, execute, and monitor our progress,” says ChartIQ CEO and co-founder Dan Schleifer.

The vendor also plans to use the new funding to invest in experienced staff to bolster its product management, customer success, and account management teams, as well as its R&D function.

“We plan to double our employee headcount across all departments. As a software company, the bulk of our employees are in product R&D, and this area will grow substantially,” Schleifer says.

This investment in R&D will be focused on further developing its ChartIQ and Finsemble products—for example, offering pre-integrated third-party applications within the Finsemble Ecosystem, and expanding the institutional use cases for ChartIQ beyond pre-trade analytics.

“With the incredible troves of data within banks and asset managers, the opportunities for visual data analytics are limitless, and our customers are increasingly using our product for things like post-trade analytics and algorithm monitoring,” Schleifer adds. “The great unbundling of financial technology has brought about a huge number of best-of-breed point products—such as our own charting—but a horrible user experience, as dozens of browser tabs can’t communicate together…. With Finsemble, clients can bring together all of their in-house applications, but with the ability to snap in vendor applications like Lego bricks, the smart desktop comes together much, much faster. Further, it dramatically speeds up trying out new applications for your users, as you can snap them in, try them, and snap them back out if your users don’t like them.”

Third-party applications could even include those from other companies in which Digital+ Partners has invested. “One of the things that attracted us to Digital+ is that fintech is only one of their vertical focus areas. We’re excited to explore use cases for both ChartIQ and Finsemble in other industries through collaboration with Digital+’s portfolio companies,” Schleifer says.