Financial communication platform Symphony has set its sights on an aggressive global expansion after raising $165 million in a funding round joined by Standard Chartered and MUFG Innovation Partners.
The funding brings Symphony’s total capital raised to date to over $460 million and values the company at around $1.3 billion, according to CNBC - a modest rise from $1 billion two years ago.
Initially positioned as a bank-backed alternative to Bloomberg's chat platform, in just four and a half years Symphony has acquired over 430,000 licensed users, 100,000 more than its more established rival.
The company is no looking to expand beyond messaging to become the standard collaboration workflow platform for its community, staking a central place in the digitisation of financial markets.
In the last year it has seen the development of more than 1000 bots and apps on its platform by its community of customers and partners and launched Symphony Market Solutions, a new business to help customers speed up their digital transformation initiatives via workflow automation along with a suite of standardised, licensable software.
The new funds will be used to build out the Market Solutions business and to push into new markets around the world.
David Gurlé, CEO, Symphony, says: “This investment establishes an unprecedented coalition of East and West, North to South and unites fragmented communication infrastructure into a mission-critical secure and compliant collaboration platform - an unprecedented global effort to accelerate efficient financial workflows."
Darren Cohen, global head, PSI, at investor Goldman Sachs, adds: “While we’re thrilled with Symphony’s traction and global network buildout, we also believe the transformative period of Symphony’s journey is just beginning. The rapid proliferation of Symphony bots and application integrations across the trade lifecycle and throughout the enterprise gives us a glimpse into the future."