Exchange operator Nasdaq has announced the opening of a new equities platform targeting fintech firms and technologists. This helps Nasdaq to continue to diversify its revenue stream away from trading and more towards technology provision.
The new platform, dubbed “Nasdaq Ventures,” is a global venture investing program focused on cultivating talent and technology advancement within financial services — spurring innovation that ensures Nasdaq’s technology and services are at the forefront of the industry.
Investments provided by Nasdaq Ventures will range from $1M to $10M and seed- to Series C funding. Each investment will work with and support our core business strategies and mission.
Initial focus will include: digital transfer/payment/transaction processing; machine and artificial intelligence; emerging and frontier marketplace; and data & analytics.
“As a financial technology leader, we are committed to the further development of global markets through innovative technology that advances our clients' ambitions,” Nasdaq said in a statement. “Because of this commitment, we launched Nasdaq Ventures in order to partner with revolutionary technologists who are shaping the fintech sector.”
The goal of Ventures is to partner with unique fintech companies worldwide – and the main objective is to identify and collaborate on new technologies and groundbreaking services and solutions. To do so, Nasdaq has partnered with three firms to launch the platform.
First is Chain, a technology company on a mission to enable a smarter and more connected financial system by digitizing the world’s assets. Based in San Francisco, they partner with leading organizations around the world to build, deploy, and operate blockchain networks that enable breakthrough financial products and services.
Chain was founded in 2014 and has raised over $40 million in funding from a variety of companies, including Nasdaq, since their inception. Chain is featured on Forbes Top 50 Fintech picks.
Chain's enterprise-grade Chain Core platform underpins the Nasdaq Linq offering, which is a digital ledger technology that leverages a blockchain to facilitate the issuance, cataloguing and recording of transfers of shares of privately-held companies on The NASDAQ Private Market.
The second company is Digital Reasoning, a leader in cognitive computing that enables firms across financial services, enterprise, health and government understand underlying context behind human communication and become more efficient in their activities. In January 2017, Digital Reasoning was recognized by CB insights amongst the most promising AI companies around the globe. Digital Reasoning is featured on Forbes Top 50 Fintech picks.
Digital Reasoning’s eComms monitoring for proactive compliance and Nasdaq’s industry leading and award-winning SMARTS Surveillance solutions will deliver a unified approach to trade surveillance by integrating trading alerts with natural language processing and machine intelligence-based technology all within a single interface.
And the third company, Hanweck, is a provider of real-time risk analytics on global derivatives markets focusing on the large-scale risk problems of banks, broker/dealers, hedge funds, central counterparties and exchanges — where the number of instruments and positions number in the millions.
Hanweck delivers its risk analytics as a real-time service — usually in the form of a data feed — thereby dramatically simplifying integration with its customers' risk architecture.
Nasdaq Ventures is currently seeking companies in fintech with a focus on:
Digital transfer / payment / transaction processing
Machine intelligence / Artificial Intelligence
Emerging / Frontier Marketplaces
Data & Analytics
Nasdaq’s venture investment program is global in nature and will evaluate companies from jurisdictions outside of the United States.
