Yahoo Finance Wealthsimple raises $610M at a $4B valuation
Canadian fintech giant Wealthsimple has raised a new round of $750 million CAD (~$610 million) at a post-money valuation of $5 billion CAD (~$4 billion). The round was led by Meritech and Greylock, and includes funding from Inovia, Sagard and Redpoint, Two Sigma Ventures, TCV, as well as individual investors including Drake, Ryan Reynolds and Michael J. Fox (basically, all the most famous Canadians).
Wealthsimple's big new raise more than triples its valuation from its last round, a $114 million CAD (roughly $93 million) funding announced last October, which carried a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion CAD ($~1.22 billion USD). The Toronto-based company has been a leader in the realm of democratizing financial products for consumers, including stock trading, crypto asset sales and peer-to-peer money transfers.
The company says that it experienced significant growth during the pandemic, which is likely one big reason why its valuation rose so much between its most recent raise and this one. Its commission-free retail investment platform has grown "rapidly" over the course of the past 14 months, the company says, and the crypto trading platform that it launched last August has also seen strong uptake given the recent surge in consumer interest in cryptocurrency assets.
Late last year, Wealthsimple soft-launched its P2P money transfer app, Wealthsimple Cash, and in March it made it available to all Canadians. The app is very similar in terms of features to Venmo or Square's Cash app, but neither of those offerings have been available to Canadians thus far. Wealthsimple's app, which is free to use and distinct from its stock trading and crypto platforms, has thus tapped significant pent-up demand in the market and seen rapid uptake thus far.
With this funding, Wealthsimple plans to "expand its market position, build out its product suite, and grow its team." The company also offers automated savings and investing products (the robo-adviser tools it was originally founded around), as well as tax filing tools, and it has demonstrated a clear appetite and ability to expand its offerings to encompass even more of its customers financials lives when committed with fresh resources to do so.
The company says it has over 1.5 million users, with over $10 billion in assets under management as of the last publicly available numbers.
