Eventus Systems, a financial regulation technology company, announced Wednesday that it acquired $30 million in Series B funding that it will use to double its workforce and expand its capacity to monitor financial markets.
The Austin-based startup previously announced it raised $10.5 million in Series A funding in February 2020. Since then, the firm has grown from 15 employees to 55 employees worldwide, including 20 based in Austin.
With the new funding, Eventus CEO Travis Schwab plans to more than double his workforce within the next year. He is now seeking candidates across the globe to work in sales, product and engineering roles.
Eventus will also use the funding to expand the capabilities of its flagship software, Validus, which monitors high volumes of trading data across equities, options, futures, cryptocurrencies, foreign exchange currencies and fixed income markets.
The platform is used by top banks, brokerages, exchanges and proprietary trading firms to more effectively solve for regulatory challenges and manage financial risk.
“[Capital market companies] need to become more efficient so they can sift through the noise and focus on the issues they need to as it relates to their regulatory requirements. That is the essence of what we try to do,” Schwab told Built In. “We take in this huge amount of data, and we try to make sure we are bubbling up the most actionable alerts for them to look at.”
Schwab said Eventus has seen the most growth recently in cryptocurrency exchanges and fixed income markets.
“[Fixed income] is a monster asset class that is just starting to adopt some of the similar approaches and regulatory structures that the equities and futures asset classes are, so that’s going to be an interesting growth area for us,” he said.
Schwab added that he also plans to expand into the $5 trillion foreign exchange market, which presents a major opportunity for the company.
“We’re not even in the first inning,” Schwab said of the demand for surveillance in the foreign exchange market. “We’re still on our way to the ballpark.”
Although Eventus is best known for its trade surveillance applications that help companies meet their regulatory requirements, Schwab said he would also like to explore other possible applications for the large amount of data collected from financial markets.
“We are pulling in massive amounts of data, then we normalize it and build trade surveillance on top of that. But we can also just give it back to [clients], because they need it to power all sorts of different systems.
“There are lots of ways to lever the infrastructure we’ve built... that we haven't had the resources to do up until now,” he continued. “Part of our use of the [Series B funding] will be building out some of those resources to be able to offer novel ways to look at data – and maybe offer data as a service.”
The Series B funding round was led by Centana Growth Partners. Existing investors Jump Capital and LiveOak Venture were joined by DRW VC, an arm of principal trading firm DRW, as well as CMT Digital and several new strategic investors.
“The past year has demonstrated the increased need for automating and strengthening regulatory compliance. We’ve been incredibly impressed by the deeply experienced team and efficient, scalable and powerful trade surveillance and market risk system that Eventus has built,” Matt Alfieri, principal at Centana Growth Partners, said in a statement. “Its clients are truly passionate about the platform and quality of service. As the focus of trade surveillance widens to other asset classes like crypto, Eventus is poised not only to set the standard for compliance and transparency but to further accelerate its growth trajectory.”
