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Investor Networking Service Covestor Raises $360M - CBL
By Citybizlist Staff
NEW YORK - According to an SEC filing New York based Covestor Inc. has closed on $360 million in equity financing from 9 investors.
Covestor Inc. provides trade sharing services for self-investors internationally. It focuses on long and short equity investments, including exchange traded funds. Investors can track their own investments and, Twitter-like, the investments of others. Covestor compensates those who share their data and offers management services as well.
The company's site includes stock bloggers, stock rankings and a host of social networking features.
Principals named in the filing are co-founders Richard Tahta, Perry Blacher, and Simon Veingard, and directors Todd Dagres and Albert Wenger.
According to CrunchBase, over $100 million dollars in securities are shared through the service, with investors from 40 countries. The company received$1M in angel funding in 2007 and $6.5M in Series A funding in 2008.
Reg D filing: http://tinyurl.com/ygjp34v
Bio of principals taken from Covestor Inc. Web site
Richard 'Rikki' Tahta - Co-Founder
Rikki Tahta has held a number of senior roles in Finance and Information Services. Previous start-ups include ARK Information (acquired by Thomson Financial), WebTrack (acquired by Jupiter Communications - later public on NASDAQ), Steelhead Systems (acquired by Merrill Lynch) and Bookpages (acquired by Amazon.com). Other positions include Chase Capital Partners (private equity) and Thomson Financial (Securities Data Corporation). Rikki lives in New York and loves fishing.
Perry Blacher - Co-Founder
Perry has over 10 years of experience in Strategy and Online Services. He started his career at McKinsey & Co (management consulting) before heading up Business Development for Microsoft MSN in Europe, and later as a Principal with Chase Capital Partners (private equity). Prior to Covestor, Perry was founder and CEO of Serum, a disease management support and data service (acquired by Tribal Group PLC). Perry lives in London and is recently married.
Simon Veingard - Co-Founder
Simon has more than 15 years Operations and Information Management expertise within Financial Services. At Goldman Sachs, Simon spent 6 years managing the Investment Banking's information services requirements across Europe and Asia before joining Ernst & Young (management consulting). He was then hired by GAM (a leading fund of funds manager formerly owned by UBS) to manage their global Data Services function. Prior to founding Covestor, Simon co-founded Beyond Data LLC to provide relationship intelligence data to financial institutions. Simon lives in London and is a big fan of Arsenal Football Club.
Directors
Todd Dagres (profile taken from Crunchbase)
Todd Dagres (AKA Sting) is a founder and General Partner of Spark Capital. He has said that his work to bring Akamai from idea to publicly traded company was his doctoral thesis in venture capital. Todd has led Spark's investments in Veoh Networks, Menara Networks, Verivue, EQAL, Covestor, Kateeva and Intune Networks. Todd was previously a General Partner and Executive Committee Member at Battery Ventures. There he led the Communications Investment practice while focusing on the media, entertainment and communications industries. Some of his investments at Battery include Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ:AKAM), Qtera (acquired by Nortel Networks), XCOM (acquired by Level 3 Communications), Redstone (acquired by Siemens), River Delta Networks (acquired by Motorola), Broadbus Technologies (acquired by Motorola), Arbor Networks and Cedar Point Communications. Todd was also a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management for a number of years, where he taught a course entitled "New Enterprise." His entertainment and media endeavors include establishing two film and television production companies (Prospect Pictures and Ealing Studios) that together have produced over 10 films and TV shows since 2003. Prior to Battery Ventures, Todd was Principal and Senior Technology Analyst at Montgomery Securities; Senior Technology Analyst and Vice President at Smith Barney/Robinson Humphrey; Vice President of Communications at the Yankee Group; and Business Development Manager for Networks and Communications at Digital Equipment Corporation.
Todd Dagres holds an MBA from Boston University and a BS in psychology from Trinity College, Hartford, CT.
About Covestor from CrunchBase
Covestor is a portfolio-sharing service that offers individual (self-directed) investors the opportunity to compete with, and be rewarded like, professionals. Covestor enables investors to build a verified track record and to collect a following of other investors based upon it. Covestor aims to de-institutionalize fund management.
The service creates for each member a Morningstar-style fact sheet to highlight their investment prowess. By applying institutional grade mark to market daily performance calculation to individuals' accounts, Covestor allows users to track their own portfolio (e.g. Sharpe, Beta, Maximum Drawdown) and to benchmark their activity both against other members, against market indices and against professional fund managers. Members are then ranked according to more than 150 different dimensions to allow other users to find and track those who match their investment goals. If you choose to track a member, you will receive an email notification of each trade the member makes and you can decide whether to replicate this in your own portfolio. It is free to track a Covestor member.
Covestor's key feature is that stock portfolios are tied directly to members' actual equity accounts (eTrade, Scottrade, etc.). It is the first service which allows you to see what investors are really doing alongside what they say are doing. Using a secure link provided by Yodlee, members create a "view only" data feed to their broker.
Starting in 2008, Covestor will allow users to invest directly alongside other members of the site, who will be compensated for their following.
Over $100 million dollars in securities are shared through the service. Its members are located in more than 40 countries and hold positions in over 4,000 different securities. To ensure privacy, all data is normalized and members can choose to remain anonymous on the site.
Competitors include Fidelity, Putnam, Oppenheimer and Vanguard.
Posted Mar 8, 2010
