Symphony Raises $67M More for Platform Expansion

Symphony CEO David Gurle tells Inside Market Data that the vendor will use the $67 million—which mostly came from new investors Barclays, French investment bank Bpifrance, and Hong Kong brokerage CLSA—to fund development of new products and services. These include a content platform that will enable information providers to publish content in a Mifid II-compliant manner, as well as specific toolsets aimed at the workflows of investment bankers and wealth managers, in response to demand from those user groups, and support for voice and video content that will create opportunities for the vendor to compete in the trading turret arena.

Some of these initiatives are already underway, while others are waiting for Symphony to hire the right staff to get them underway. Gurle says he expects them to come to fruition around October, and others to stretch into early 2019, adding that the vendor will build some of these in-house, but that in some cases where it does not have experience of a specific area, buying an existing provider may make more sense.

Gurle says Symphony had interest from other potential investors, but wanted to focus on attracting “strategic” investors who not only bring cash to the table, but can also accelerate the vendor’s “network effect… so that our interests are not only financially aligned but also strategically aligned.”

In fact, Gurle says that although he expects the company to continue growing “really well”—it now has more than 300 client firms, about 60 percent of which are buy-side firms—his primary focus is on attracting more investment, rather than becoming profitable quickly. “We choose not to be profitable at this point in time… because there is more opportunity to invest,” he adds.

The $67 million brings the total funding raised by Symphony to more than $300 million.