Amsterdam’s fintech firm Propellant.digital raises funds from Volta Ventures

Amsterdam-based Propellant.Digital, an analytics fintech firm that gathers and evaluates trade data to help businesses make decisions, announced on Tuesday, July 11, that it has secured fresh strategic funding. 

The amount, however, remains undisclosed.

The company’s goal is to take trading activity on the financial markets and make it visible, available, and reasonably priced for all in the financial ecosystem.

The investor supporting Propellant

The investment was led by Volta Ventures, a seed and early-stage venture capital firm focused on software startups in the Benelux region.

The Amsterdam-based VC firm has €125M to invest in “promising” startups, with initial investments ranging from €300K to €2M.

Sander Vonk of Volta Ventures, says, “Vincent and Allan (co-founders of Propellant) have identified an opportunity to help buy-side and sell-side firms capture and analyse Fixed Income trading activity, to improve market transparency for all parties.”

“Propellant’s rate of growth has been impressive, with 27 clients live only 18 months after launching the company. We believe there is a significant opportunity for further growth, not only in the Fixed Income market but also in other areas of Financial Markets,” adds Vonk.

A software vendor of capital markets analytics solutions

Propellant says, although there is a variety of trading data accessible, such as the amount and price of traded bonds, the fixed-income market is opaque, making it difficult for corporations to fully utilise the information at their disposal. 

Information is stored in many different formats and silos as a result of a highly fragmented market.

This is where Propellant looks to operate. The company’s platform brings all global fixed-income trading activity under one roof.

Founded in 2021 by Vincent Grandjean and Allan Horgan, Propellant’s platform provides clients with worldwide access to public and proprietary trading activities in cash, fixed-income derivatives, and Exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

The platform offers clients a variety of analytical tools after normalising, purifying, and validating the data. Its software is an open, cloud-native analytics platform that complies with ISO 27001 requirements.

Since its inception, the firm claims to have attracted more than 27 clients, including eight of the world’s top 10 fixed-income trading banks, two asset managers, two hedge funds, and four trading venues.

Propellant’s first emphasis was on Europe, leveraging MiFID II transparency and customer trading activities. It has already introduced US TRACE and SDR/SEF in 2023. Firms operating in Europe and the US can now see a full picture of their trade activities through a single platform.

Capital utilisation

Co-founder Vincent Grandjean says, “Since launching in 2021, we have been diligent about creating a reliable and top-quality offering and have grown rapidly with a diverse range of clients.”

“This new investment allows us to continue to enhance our range of analytics and scale our platform, to hire more developers and salespeople to add to our growing list of buy-side and sell-side clients,” adds Grandjean.