Eventus Systems, an Austin startup that provides financial market monitoring services to banks and investment firms, announced Wednesday that it closed on a $10.5 million funding round led by Jump Capital and LiveOak Venture Partners.
The company’s AI-enabled software Validus is a trade surveillance solution that monitors high volumes of trading data across equities, cryptocurrencies and foreign exchanges. The platform is used by a range of players in the financial industry, from top banks to brokerages to proprietary trading firms, to more effectively solve for regulatory challenges and manage financial risk.
Validus has earned Eventus four awards in the last year, including a Risk Technology Award for Market Surveillance Product of the Year and a Best Trade Surveillance Solution award from A-Team’s RegTech Insight Awards. CEO Travis Schwab attributes the company’s success to its platform’s usability and versatility.
“These systems require a lot of different data sets across lots of different areas of the business, so the implementation can be challenging. But we provide different mechanisms and different ways to implement the software that's really flexible,” Schwab told Built In. “And then we have a lot of flexibility built into the platform itself, so it can really be tailored to the person's business.”
Schwab says Eventus is planning to add another 20 people to its team of 15 in the next year, hiring out of Austin and other offices in Chicago, London, Hong Kong and Singapore. The funding will also be used to build Eventus’ customer base and innovate its product, beginning with the data it has access to.
“Really the lifeblood of the system is data. That data comes from the exchanges themselves, comes from vendors, it comes from other sources,” Schwab said. “To compete across the globe, across asset classes, we need a lot of different data sets. We've built up a big data capture infrastructure, but we need to keep expanding that.”
Jump Capital Principal Peter Johnson and Krishna Srinivasan, a founding partner at LiveOak, have joined Eventus’ board of directors as part of the financing as well. Srinivasan says he chose to work with the company because of its deep understanding of the regtech space.
“The complexity of managing surveillance of trades alerting is very complicated and very dynamic in nature, so there is enormous opportunity to build a modern, deep technology-enabled software platform that can monitor the activity,” Srinivasan told Built In. “[Eventus has] an incredibly impressive team that is world-class in its domain knowledge, initially as practitioners and now as people who run a software company for the industry.”
