Primus Capital, a growth-oriented private equity firm, has made a minority investment in LiquidityBook, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based provider of buy- and sell-side trading solutions.
The capital will enable LiquidityBook to further scale its business and serve a broader array of fund managers and financial institutions through its industry-leading portfolio, order and execution management system (POEMS) platform.
LiquidityBook will use the funds to enhance its products in response to client demand for additional functionality that goes beyond the traditional POEMS. This initiative is already well underway, as the company manages its own proprietary FIX network, LBX Connect, and recently made two key hires to support it: Stephanie Minister as Managing Director of Connectivity Services and Sumit Kumar as Senior FIX Specialist. The additional resources will meaningfully accelerate product development efforts as demand for multi-tenant trading technology with a single code base continues to grow, and will support global expansion.
“LiquidityBook began as a true bootstrapped startup, and working to grow it into one of the leading providers in our space has been an incredibly gratifying experience for all of us,” says Kevin Samuel, CEO and co-founder of LiquidityBook. “Thanks to strong adoption and continued client demand, our product roadmap and plans for expansion are as ambitious as ever. We have reached an inflection point where capital funding will accelerate those plans, and we are very pleased to have identified Primus as the ideal partner. Primus has a well-established track record of helping growing companies reach the next level. We look forward to a fruitful relationship and plan to leverage their financial support and strategic guidance to deliver real efficiencies for new and existing clients.”
“In what has been a period of uncertainty for many in the industry, our growth has been a constant,” says Sean Sullivan, Chief Revenue Officer at LiquidityBook. “As the number of industry firms waking up to the limitations of legacy systems continues to increase, we are rapidly winning market share thanks to our multi-tenant, SaaS-based model and superior functionality. This is key validation, but it also means we need to think bigger in order to continue our trajectory. This capital infusion will allow us to build out our team, make ongoing enhancements to the LBX suite and reach new clients and prospects in new markets.”
“LiquidityBook stands out as the most innovative solution in the POEMS space, addressing the primary pain points around trading flexibility, asset class expansion, cost control and compliance,” said Ron Hess, Managing Director at Primus. “We have repeatedly heard dissatisfaction with the status quo, but apprehension around making a change given the mission-criticality of these types of systems. On the contrary, LiquidityBook’s customers rave about them as a business partner, and were universally surprised by how seamlessly the onboarding process went. The most frequent sentiment we heard was ‘I wish I had done this years ago.’”
LiquidityBook was advised in the transaction by Innovation Advisors, a technology-focused global investment bank based in New York and London. LiquidityBook recently announced record revenues and overall client growth in 2020.
