Monark, a fintech startup that embeds private market investments and trading solutions within traditional brokerage and wealth platforms, has announced a $2.2M Seed Round led by Garuda Ventures, with participation from K50 Ventures, Grit Capital Partners, Niche Capital, and notable angel investors including Nik Talreja, the CEO of Sydecar and Shriram Bhashyam, the COO of Sydecar. This round brings Monark’s total funding to $3.6M. Previous investors include Forum Ventures and Night Capital.
“We are truly grateful to everyone within the Monark network who helped bring this financing round together,” said Ben Haber, Monark’s Co-founder and CEO. “We are solving a major infrastructure challenge in capital markets that seeks to open up access to private investments at scale, and the entire Monark team has been energized by the possibilities that this financing round enables.”
“When we first met Ben and Paul, we knew that they were building something special. The strategic acquisitions of LEX Markets and of Monark’s broker dealer subsidiary, MMM Securities, greatly accelerated Monark’s entry into the highly regulated capital markets ecosystem, which has been a historically high barrier to entry for start-ups,” said Rishi Taparia, Co-Founder and General Partner at Garuda Ventures “Given the depth of expertise and experience of Monark’s executive and advisory team and the tremendous progress they have made to date, we believe Monark is well positioned to be a category leader and deliver a better experience for individuals to get access to alternative investments.”
Founded in 2022, Monark’s unique B2B strategy takes advantage of two major trends in capital markets. On the demand side, Monark connects to the significant demand for access to alternative investments from mass-affluent investors (est. by Bain to be $9.4T by 2032), by integrating directly with their native brokerage platform and custodian. On the other side of the market, Monark works directly with issuers and alternative asset managers to structure investment products that fit the needs of the mass affluent investor, an investor segment which many alternative asset managers have described as the final frontier.
“Monark’s API stack offers direct to consumer investment platforms that have already scaled their user base by providing access to public markets, a way to increase their revenue per user by offering private securities,” said Paul Davis, Monark’s COO.”Cross-selling private investments offers brokerages and wealth platforms the opportunity to generate brokerage commissions on product placement, in an industry where the average RPU for public market investments has been suppressed significantly by 0% commissions and the PFOF business model.”
In May of 2023, Monark closed on the acquisition of the technology assets and IP developed by LEX Markets through an insolvency process. LEX Markets had previously raised $27M in venture funding from a number of notable venture investors including Greycroft, Khosla and Peak6. Monark operates a fully owned subsidiary known as MMM Securities LLC, which is a FINRA member broker dealer approved to offer private placements, retail mutual funds and operate an alternative trading system.
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