Hong Kong-based startup 8 Securities has recently closed a round of funding worth US$8 million, according to co-founder and CEO Mikaal Abdulla, in conversation with PO. The company’s service is a a socially-engaged “trading portal” that makes it easy for anyone to invest in financial markets using its app-ified dashboard – as we saw when Mikaal and his team made it through to the TC Disrupt Beijing Startup Battlefield which we live-blogged back in November.
Since then, 8 Securities has been in private beta. But now it’s ready for primetime having gotten its license from regulatory authorities in Hong Kong, and will launch publicly just after Chinese New Year.
The $8 million in funding, says Mikaal, is primarily from Hong Kong-based Full Global Investments, and the Dutch Velocity Capital. That fits in with the American entrepreneurs’ “real aversion to traditional VC funds who are far too conservative in Asia” and which tend to shy away from backing true innovation. It’s a subject he seems to feel passionate about and has even blogged about very openly.
Funding-Powered Future
Mikaal is pictured on the right, presenting at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing last November. Image by Penn-Olson staff.
Having closed that substantial round of investment, Mikaal says that 8 Securities has big plans ahead:
We aim to completely disrupt this very traditional [stock trading] industry that has been dominated by institutions. Giving individuals insight into the larger community’s most active trades, trending topics, and sentiment in real-time has never been done.
Our technology was built from the ground up to be multi-lingual, multi-market, and multi-currency. So after we launch in Hong Kong (we launched one of Hong Kong’s first online investing services over 10 years ago) we will expand further. My co-founder and I were privileged to manage 15 geographies for E*TRADE for 10 years before we launched 8 Securities so we have deep experience in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and North America.
The choice of partners itself has significance, given the shared view of Mikaal and his team that their venture is not about a speedy exit. He explains:
As a founding team with a long-term orientation, our top priority was to partner with investors who shared our world view. After meeting a number of traditional venture capital funds, it was evident that the exit was paramount for them. For us, we were more focused on the journey. While VCs centered the discussion around metrics and a spreadsheet, Full Global and Velocity put strategy and the team at the forefront. All of our investors are entrepreneurs and have run businesses. As such, they have an inherent empathy and understanding of the opportunities and challenges that we face. While we were fortunate enough to have a number of options, we put our faith in people and not simply dollars […] Our investors never asked us to play it safe.
And so the service, which tags itself as “the world’s smartest online brokerage” will launch to the public in early February, right after the upcoming Chinese New Year holiday. Initially it’ll support US and Hong Kong markets, and RMB, HKD, and USD all within one account. Further markets will be added in due course. And not forgetting a pair of mobile apps for iOS and Android.
This two-minute introductory video shows the good-looking, modular trading dashboard where its users do their stuff: