01 Feb 2019
ICON have advised Mosaic Smart Data on a ScaleUp funding round co-led by CommerzVentures and Octopus Ventures with follow on investment from JP Morgan.
Mosaic Smart Data, the real-time capital markets data analytics company, will use the investment to support its rapid product development and global expansion.
The round is co-led by CommerzVentures and Octopus Ventures and includes J.P. Morgan – an existing investor and client.
Daily trading activity in the capital markets generates vast quantities of raw transaction and pricing data. Institutions are increasingly looking to extract the value from this, largely untapped, data asset. Annual spending on data analytics and market data has now grown to over USD 30.5 billion a year.1 Being able to refine this raw data and distil it into meaningful ‘Smart Data’, where value can be extracted in the form of actionable insights, is a significant challenge that all market participants face, but success offers a proven and compelling competitive advantage for both buy-side and sell-side.
Mosaic Smart Data’s solution cleanses, normalizes and enriches this raw data and provides a consolidated real-time view and analysis across the flows of market activity. Mosaic’s advanced suite of machine learning models identify and alert the user to opportunities and threats, generating actionable insights specific to user job functions from sales and trading to management and compliance.
The firm provides analytics technology suitable for investment banks, buy-side firms, custodians, ECN’s, exchanges and regulators.
Heiko Schwender, Principal at CommerzVentures, said: “Data analytics is becoming an integral part of every industry and the capital markets are no different. We will soon be at a position where it is a prerequisite for performance in the markets. This presents a huge opportunity for Mosaic Smart Data, which has built a platform which sets the gold standard for capital markets analytics. We are thrilled to be part of Mosaic Smart Data’s journey.”
Warren Rabin, Co-Head of Global Macro Sales and Marketing at J.P. Morgan, said: “Today’s financial markets are awash in data at a scale never seen before, but what really drives performance is being able to extract truly actionable insights from that data in real-time. Tools like this that quickly make sense of vast data sets are changing the way our teams respond and operate and are going to become a differentiating factor for banks as they look to add value in their client discussions.”
Zihao Xu, Future of Money lead & early stage investor at Octopus Ventures, said: “One of the most exciting applications of artificial intelligence is combining it with human intelligence to create something which is more than the sum of its parts. Mosaic Smart Data’s machine learning models surface data insights that even the best human quant may not spot, delivering them to staff in a way which lets them act immediately. That is a powerful combination to drive productivity and performance across FICC markets globally.”
Matthew Hodgson, CEO and Founder of Mosaic Smart Data, said: “Mosaic Smart Data’s mission is to empower financial market professionals with usable, data-driven tools to ask the questions they need answered and to receive those results in a language they can understand. We want them to feel as though they have the firm’s best quant sitting at their desk 24/7, able to answer any question they have almost instantly. That is the power of smart data analytics.
“This is a mission which is driving incredible interest among the world’s leading financial institutions. With the support of these investors, we’ll be able to take full advantage of the opportunity, accelerating deployment of the Mosaic Smart Data platform for clients and ensuring we keep the platform at the cutting edge of data analytics R&D and smart data technology.”
Nicky Cotter, Head of FinTech at ICON Corporate Finance, who led the Series B round added: “Mosaic Smart Data is an outstanding and highly innovative company who have recognised a major gap in the Capital Market space. We’re delighted to have secured funding from some of FinTech’s biggest global investors to support their rapid growth.”
This transaction further supports ICON’s FinTech deal expertise which includes among others the strategic investment by Aviva into Wealthify, Synova Capital & FiveW Capital’s investment into Merit, the acquisition of Cypad by ParentPay and Parmenion by Aberdeen Asset Management.
1Financial Market Data/Analysis, Global Share & Segment Sizing 2019: Burton-Taylor (2019)