TradingView acquires TradeIt to add instant trading APIs to its investor toolkit

Published April 2, 2019

After raising $37 million to bring its on-the-spot stock market analytics tools to a wider range of publishers and other internet partners, TradingView today has announced its first acquisition to supercharge the services that it offers to investors, wherever they happen to be online. The startup has acquired TradeIt, which has built an API for on-the-spot trading on any site that uses it.

The terms of deal were not disclosed, but we understand from sources close to the deal that it was under $20 million, more specifically in the “high teens.” TradeIt, which used to be called Trading Ticket, had raised about $12 million from investors that included Peter Thiel’s mostly-fintech fund Valar Ventures, Citi Ventures and others. TradingView had raised just over $40 million with investors including Insight Partners, TechStars and others.

The deal is a big move for consolidation: together the two say they will serve more than 10 million monthly active users in 150 countries, covering some $70 billion in linked assets. But also, better economies of scale, and better margins for companies that provide services that touch consumers not necessarily from a “home” of their own.

The latter is a growing trend that has mirrored the rise of social media and other services that aggregate content from multiple sources; and also the bigger trend of instant, on-demand everything, where consumers are happier with the convenience of buying or engaging with something right when they want to, rather than shopping around, delaying or navigating to another place to do it.

That has also seen the rise of commerce APIs to buy things instantly, not to mention the emergence of a wide range of commerce applications that let people easily buy goods and services on the spot. (And in line with that, TradingView says that nearly half of its user base today is millennials, with an additional 13 percent even younger, Gen Z. “The groups are particularly drawn to [our] extensive charting expertise,” the company says.)

In fintech, and in the world of investing specifically, that’s a trend that has also helped the growth of cryptocurrency, which has opened up the world of investing and thinking about investing to a whole new class of consumers who — for better or worse — are hearing about investing opportunities via viral social media campaigns and other new kinds of channels. Whether cryptocurrency speculation bears out longer term, it is depositing a new class of people into the world of thinking about companies and investing in them.

That taps into the sweet spot where TradeIt and TradingView are building their business.

“TradeIt’s secure and compliant relationships with established U.S. retail brokerages, coupled with their robust integrations with top investing apps, allows TradingView to be part of the backbone of the investing ecosystem,” said Denis Globa, TradingView founder and CEO, in a statement.

TradingView’s partners today include Crunchbase, Investopedia, SeekingAlpha, Zacks, Binance, CME Group and Entrepreneur, where users are able to access a premium tier of TradingView tools by way of a subscription in order to do some instant data and price modelling of a company that they might be reading about. The thinking is that now they will also be able to go one step further by trading stocks related to that information. TradingView, meanwhile, can use that extra feature to make a little more money and sell its service to partners as more sticky, to the tune of 80 percent more time spent with publishers as a result of integrating TradingView’s tools.

That’s something that the two companies can already attest to doing well in partnership.

“TradingView’s vision aligns strongly with our view of the distributed financial networks of the future,” said Nathan Richardson, TradeIt CEO, in a statement. “We’ve worked with TradingView for several years now, and always felt our complementary products and shared retail investing users makes us stronger together.”

Richardson and his cofounder Betsy Eisenberg — who are both joining TradingView — had together built Yahoo Finance — so they are already well experienced in how to leverage the potential of bringing together content with utility.

“Nathan Richardson and Betsy Eisenberg are fintech pioneers who led the development of Yahoo! Finance from scratch. With them on board, we’re extremely excited about the growth potential,” Globa said.

Cryptocurrency and a stock market boom pushes TradingView to $37 million in new funding

Published May 21, 2018

Fueled by last year’s greed-inducing visions of a cryptocurrency boom and a stock market largely untethered from classical economics, TradingView, a developer of social networking and data analysis tools for financial markets, has raised millions in new venture funding.

The New York-based company just scored $37 million in funding led by the growth-stage investment firm Insight Venture Partners .

TradingView has developed a proprietary, JavaScript-based programming language called PineScript, which lets anyone develop their own customized financial analysis tools. The company “freemium” software as a service model that lets most users connect and exchange trading tips and tricks for free, but begins charging when customers want access to more charts, data and real-time server-side alerts.

There are three payment plans beginning at $15, with a mid-tier at $30 and a high-end $60 per-month premium option.

The company had previously boosted its growth by offering its charting software for free to partner websites like SeekingAlpha, Bitfinex and the Nasdaq. That strategy helped it grow to 8 million monthly active users with around 61 percent coming from direct traffic as of March of this year.

These days the company derives nearly 75 percent of its revenue from those monthly subscription plans to individual traders. TradingView’s executives think the company still has an opportunity to expand its footprint among those retail investors, but it’s also planning to make a push to serve more institutional clients with its toolkit.

For the past seven years the company has enjoyed consistent growth, according to TradingView co-founder and chief operations officer, Stan Bokov.

For Paul Szurek, a vice-president at Insight Venture Partners, the investment in TradingView is building off of broad consumer interest in amateur speculative trading. Looking at RobinHood, Bux and eToro as gateways for new investors who eventually move on to more sophisticated tools, Szurek said that TradingView was often their next step into market investing.

“The rise of cryptocurrencies… and trading those assets… has flywheeled into a broader interest in investing across asset classes,” Szurek said.

While TradingView was never crypto-focused, according to Bokov, the company was supportive from the beginning and it’s been a boon to the broader business. “They came for crypto. They stayed for the other stuff,” Bokov said.

And crypto might just be the gateway drug for younger speculative traders to start investing in financial markets more broadly, according to Szurek. “October to January, during the real core of the crypto boom here, there were a lot of users coming in starting out researching that asset class broadly. Eighty percent move on to research other asset classes,” he said. “As TradingView kind of pushed through the [first quarter], trends in growth really diverged from what we were seeing in purely crypto-focused business and that’s a testament to users leveraging this one-stop-shop component of the platform.”

Additional investors in the new TradingView include DRW Venture Capital and Jump Capital. The company was a graduate of the 2013 Techstars Chicago batch and was seeded by Irish Angels, Techstars, iTech Capital and undisclosed angel investors.

“TradingView was built for non-professional traders, but its accessible trading tools and powerful-yet-intuitive charting capabilities have attracted the attention of institutional investors,” said Kimberly Trautmann, head of DRW Venture Capital, in a statement. “As an investor, we are excited about the diverse cross section of the industry that TradingView has reached and its rapid growth. As a proprietary trading firm on an institutional level, we’re looking forward to leveraging the platform and contributing to its further development.”