Propellant.digital (“Propellant”), the analytics FinTech which captures and analyses global trading activity to drive business decisions, has secured a strategic investment led by Volta Ventures, the seed and early-stage venture capital firm focused on software startups.
Since Propellant was launched in mid 2021 its analytics platform has attracted over 27 clients, including 8 of the world’s top 10 Fixed Income trading banks, 2 Asset Managers, 2 Hedge Funds and 4 trading venues.
Despite a wealth of available trading data, including the size and price of traded bonds, the Fixed Income market is opaque, where firms are unable to maximise the full value of available information. The result of a highly fragmented market, information is held in numerous siloes and in multiple different formats.
Propellant resolves this market-wide issue by unifying all global Fixed Income trading activity. Utilising Propellant’s technology platform, clients can access public and proprietary trading activity from cash, Fixed Income derivatives and ETFs globally. The Propellant platform normalises, cleans and validates the data, then provides clients with a wide range of analytical tools. The software solution is an open, cloud-native, analytics platform which meets ISO 27001 requirements.
Propellant was founded by Vincent Grandjean who created the platform to maximise the value of public and proprietary trading activity, following 20 years in the industry at banks including SocGen, Citi and UBS. His co-founder, Allan Horgan is Chief Technology Officer who has extensive technical experience in Capital Markets, market data and regulation from ABN Amro, Optiver, HSBC, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and UBS. The firm’s mission is to take Financial Markets trading activity and make it transparent, accessible, and affordable to all parties in the financial ecosystem.
At launch the firm’s focus was Europe, leveraging MiFID II transparency and clients’ trading activity. Earlier in 2023 it added US TRACE and SDR/SEF. Now firms trading in Europe and USA are able to get a complete picture of all their trading activity under a single lens.
Vincent Grandjean, CEO of Propellant commented: “Since launching in 2021, we have been diligent about creating a reliable and top-quality offering and have grown rapidly with a diverse range of clients. This new investment allows us to continue to enhance our range of analytics and scale our platform, to hire more developers and salespeople to add to our growing list of buy-side and sell-side clients.”
Sander Vonk, at Volta Ventures, said: “Vincent and Allan have identified an opportunity to help buy-side and sell-side firms capture and analyse Fixed Income trading activity, to improve market transparency for all parties. Propellant’s rate of growth has been impressive, with 27 clients live only 18 months after launching the company. We believe there is a significant opportunity for further growth, not only in the Fixed Income market, but also in other areas of Financial Markets.”