Ancoa, providers of contextual surveillance and insightful analytics for exchanges, regulators, buy- and sell-side firms, have successfully closed their Series A funding round last week, bringing the total investment to £4.145m. Investors include Buysse & Partners, LRM Capital, SmartFin Capital, Velocity Capital and Ancoa’s management team as well as a number of high net worth individuals and family offices. All investors are strongly committed to FinTech sector investments through the variety of their individual portfolios.
Ancoa has successfully grown their client base over the last two years, including exchanges, brokers and investment firms, such as the Zagreb Stock Exchange, the New York based SEF LedgerX and Linear Investments. Over the last year alone, Ancoa has signed collaboration agreements with Cinnober and N2N Connect in Asia, to provide surveillance tools to banks and brokerage firms globally. Ancoa’s capabilities have expanded to new asset classes including energy and commodities, fixed income, crypto-currencies and derivatives. The new funding will enable the company to expand internationally, widen its footprint and increase the team to 40 staff in total by 2016.
The capital commitment made by Buysse & Partners, LRM Capital, SmartFin Capital and Velocity Capital is testament to their belief that Ancoa has firmly established its place as a surveillance challenger to incumbent providers across financial markets. In addition, Ancoa’s FinTech success story and future growth ambitions complement the investor firms’ portfolio of FinTech investments.
Commenting on the release, Johan Buyle, Buysse & Partners said: “We have been early supporters of the Ancoa team and Ancoa’s platform’s capabilities and are delighted to be a confirmed backer once again. The ability to show that adequate and robust market surveillance capabilities are in place to both the regulators and to end-users continues to be an overriding necessity for financial institutions and we look forward to tracking Ancoa’s success in this area with great interest.”
Stijn Bijnens, CEO LRM added: “We clearly see Ancoa’s growth potential and fully back their ambition of expanding their operations by adding a support centre at Corda Campus in Limburg, Belgium. Based on Ancoa’s FinTech success to date, we remain invested in the long term growth of the firm and the continued innovation of their surveillance platform, in line with industry needs and requirements.”
Jürgen Ingels, SmartFin Capital added: “We have been committed to supporting Ancoa’s success well before the company embarked on this fundraising exercise. We are delighted to continue to support Ancoa in their Series A funding round and look forward to sharing in the Ancoa team’s developments and successes in the future.”
Willem Willemstein, Velocity Capital, commented: “We have been looking to support a compliance related FinTech project for some time as we believe this is an area of significant future growth within the FinTech sector. We have chosen to invest in Ancoa’s team and platform as we expect to see increasing demand for their surveillance capabilities over the coming years.”
Kurt Vandebroek, Chief Executive Officer of Ancoa, concluded: “We are absolutely delighted with the vote of confidence from all our investors. We are encouraged by their support of our expansion plans and also in building partnerships with industry and regulators, to bring our contextual approach to surveillance to more capital market participants. At a time when regulatory pressures to detect and deal with market abuse are ever-increasing, we will continue to invest in our team and our technology to ensure that our clients can meet their regulatory obligations with confidence.