EFTA00335691.pdf

From: To:' Subject: FW: .. let me know when you can discuss. Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2015 17:42:00 +0000 Attachments: F.PDF Look at this. My old pal From: [mailto: Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2015 12:20 PM To: Subject: ... let me know when you can discuss. I hope all is well with you. As I mentioned, we just finalized does for a second external capital raise for my new (ish) venture, an electronic credit trading platform. You have seen this movie before, in equities, fit and rates. Away from the well-publicized leads (see Bloomberg story below), Shumway (the first round lead) is back in along with a SilverLake partner group. The rest of the investor group includes a hunch of high profile rofessionals, mainly from Wall Street and Silicon Valle There are several more that I am happy to speak about. I listed most, as you probably know some of them. I founded in mid-2014 and initially funded it with close to $8 million of my own money. In less than a ten months, we launched an all-to-all trading platform with trading volumes matching or surpassing many of the competitors that had multiyear head starts. In early 2015, we successfully raised $8.25mm led by post-money valuation (Chris is a well-respected investor and thought-leader in market structure). This previous round funded our initial technology, drove the hiring of the current team and supported the launch and first 6 months of operations. EFTA00335691 The completion of this new capital raise will provide considerable runway, funding for continued technology development and further client and product expansion. Send me some times you are available to meet up to discuss. Thanks. By (Bloomberg) -- Venture capitalist Peter Thiel and billionaire George Soros are leading a $25 million investment in electronic bond-trading startup Financial LLC. The New York-based company is among a dozen firms competing to transform the corporate-debt market as worries mount over the difficulty of trading the $8.1 trillion of securities in existence. The investment, which was joined by Jeff Bahl, the former head of U.S. high-yield credit trading at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and other individual investors, would value at more than $100 million, according to people familiar with the deal, who asked not to be named because the matter is private. Corporate bond trades have historically been struck over the phone between dealer banks and their clients. New capital requirements and restrictions on the risks banks can take with their own money -- regulatory responses to the financial crisis of 2008 -- have raised concerns that even as low interest rates have spurred a boom in the market, trading bonds has become harder. "The days of a very skilled market maker that has the ability to set his or her own level of risk are over," Bahl, who is now a portfolio manager at Bahl & Gaynor Inc., said in an interview. "The business of trading bonds at banks is now glorified order taking." The backing of two of the most prominent investors in technology and finance will give a boost to at a time when many of the crop of new bond-trading platforms face an uphill battle to change firmly entrenched behavior on Wall Street. Thiel is best-known as one of the founders of PayPal and one of the first investors in Facebook Inc., while billionaire Soros has enjoyed a long and storied career as an investor. Jeremiah Hall, a spokesman for Thiel, confirmed he had made an investment, while Michael Vachon, a spokesman for George Soros, declined to comment. EFTA00335692 "This influx of capital supercharges our effort to enhance the user experience and our obsessive pursuit to improve corporate bond liquidity," founder and chief executive, said in an interview. method of providing bond market liquidity borrows from a coraioneered by Goldman Sachs, and known as GSessions. Instead of a continuous market for each security, runs what it calls "swarms," or brief sessions where asset managers and dealer banks can come together to buy and sell a particular bond. has also hired liberally from the ranks of former bank traders, tapping sell-side veterans including Ravi Singh and Chris Ruggiero from Goldman Sachs, Mike Sobel from Barclays, and Deutsche Bank's Michael Gorun. "In the end, the key is getting people to trade, which can do," Bahl said. said it has seen more than $50 billion in order volume and $2.5 billion in executed trades since its platform launched six months ago, just after the company was valued at roughly $75 million. Daily order volume currently totals about $750 million across both investment-grade and junk-rated bonds, the company said, and the average trade size is $2.5 million. MarketAxess Holdings, the dominant platform in electronic corporate bond trading, reported $82.5 billion of trades for September alone. Bloomberg LP, the parent of this news organization, also has a platform for trading corporate bonds. For Related News and Information: Financial Starts Electronic Investment-Grade Debt Trading Market-Structure News: NI MKST Top Stories:TOP Please note Disclaimer attached ( Investment Overview). EFTA00335693 THIS MESSAGE IS FOR THE NAMED PERSON'S USE ONLY. IT MAY CONTAIN CONFIDENTIAL, PROPRIETARY OR LEGALLY PRIVILEGED INFORMATION. NO CONFIDENTIALITY OR PRIVILEGE IS WAIVED OR LOST BY ANY TRANSMISSION ERRORS. IF YOU RECEIVE THIS MESSAGE IN ERROR. PLEASE IMMEDIATELY DELETE IT AND ALL COPIES OF IT FROM YOUR SYSTEM. DESTROY ANY HARD COPIES OF IT AND NOTIFY THE SENDER. YOU MUST NOT. 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