VELVET Funding, Investors & Competitors

Founded in 1998 and headquartered in New York City, Tradeweb Markets is a leading fixed-income trading platform. While it does offer electronic processing for some voice-negotiated trades, the company focuses primarily on providing electronic trading networks that connect broker/dealers, institutional clients, and retail customers. While the company offers trading in a wide variety of products, the bulk of its business is in US and European government debt, mortgage-backed securities, interest-rate swaps, and US and international corporate bonds. The firm also sells fixed-income trading and price data, primarily through a deal with Refinitiv’s Eikon service.

StoneX Group Inc is a brokerage and financial services firm. Its service offerings are execution, OTC / Market-Making, advisory services, payment solutions, market intelligence, Physical Trading and clearing services. The firm operates in four segments: Commercial, Institutional, Self-Directed/Retail, and Payments. Its customers include governmental and nongovernmental organizations, commercial banks, brokers, institutional investors, and investment banks. The company operates in the United States, South America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and other countries, out of which the majority of revenue is generated from the Middle East and Asia Region.

Allfunds is a fund distribution platform connecting fund houses and distributors, creating a single access point for both sides to gain a wider reach with regard to assets under administration and fund variety, respectively. As of 2024, Allfunds had EUR 1.6 trillion in assets under administration stemming from about 860 distributors on its platform. In return, distributors gained access to about 156,000 funds from 3,300 different fund houses. Allfunds also provides ancillary services to both fund houses and distributors, covering the marketing, distribution, legal, regulatory, as well as data and analytics needs arising in the fund distribution space. Allfunds derives the majority of its revenue from Italy, Spain, and France.

Founded in 2000, MarketAxess is a leading electronic fixed-income trading platform that connects broker/dealers and institutional investors. The company is primarily focused on credit based fixed income securities with its main trading products being US investment-grade and high-yield bonds, Eurobonds, and Emerging Market corporate debt. Recently the company has expanded more aggressively into Treasuries and municipal bonds with the acquisitions of LiquidityEdge and MuniBrokers in 2019 and 2021, respectively. The company also provides pre- and post-trade services with its acquisition of Regulatory Reporting Hub from Deutsche Börse Group in 2020 adding to its product offerings.

Saudi Tadawul Group Holding Co provides trading, clearing, and settlement services in securities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It also provides services related to innovation in technology. The company's segment includes Capital Markets; Post Trade; Data and Technology Services and Corporate. It generates maximum revenue from the Post Trade segment.

Compagnie Financiere Tradition SA is a Switzerland-based interdealer broking firm. It acts as a marketplace and an intermediary and facilitates transactions between financial institutions and other professional traders in the capital markets. Its Financial and non-financial products include bonds, interest rates, index futures, currency and credit derivatives, equities, precious metals, energy and environmental products and others. Its geographical segments are Europe, Middle East and Africa; Americas and Asia-Pacific.

Tradegate AG Wertpapierhandelsbank is a Germany-based company. It is engaged in providing banking and financial services. In addition to retail banking, the company focuses on the trading of several domestic and foreign securities on the Tradegate Exchange, and the Frankfurt and Berlin stock exchanges. The company's main business activity consists of market specialist activities and market making; it acts as a Market Specialist on the Tradegate Exchange and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and as an order book manager on the Berlin Stock Exchange. It extends its services to the securities listing on the stock exchanges in Munich, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Hanover, and Dusseldorf.

Flow Traders Ltd is a financial technology company operating in the financial markets, using its proprietary technology platform to provide liquidity by quoting bid and ask prices in financial products. It ensures the provision of liquidity to support the uninterrupted functioning of financial markets. The company's core trading focus is on exchange-traded products (ETPs), enabling investors to buy and sell ETPs by quoting bid and ask prices under virtually all market circumstances and also has expanded into fixed income, commodities, digital assets, and foreign exchange. The company's reportable segments are; Europe which generates key revenue, the Americas, and Asia.

Leonteq AG is a Swiss fintech company with a marketplace for structured investment solutions. Based on proprietary modern technology, the company offers derivative investment products and services. Leonteq acts as both a direct issuer of its products and as a partner to other financial institutions. Leonteq further enables life insurance companies and banks to produce capital-efficient, unit-linked pension products with guarantees. The company has a presence in its home market of Switzerland and other parts of Europe, as well as an established footprint in Asia and other regions.

Charles Schwab is one of the largest retail-oriented financial-services companies in the US, with $11.9 trillion in client assets across its brokerage, banking, asset management, custody, financial advisory, and wealth-management businesses at the end of 2025. While best known for its retail brokerage offering, Schwab generates the lion’s share of its revenue and profits through its Charles Schwab Bank and asset management segments. The firm is a dominant player in registered investment advisor custody, with over 40% market share, and has recently pushed into wealth management with robo-advisory, direct indexing, and other managed-investment solutions.

Robinhood Markets Inc is creating a modern financial services platform. It designs its own products and services and delivers them through a single, app-based cloud platform supported by proprietary technology. Its vertically integrated platform has enabled the introduction of new products and services such as cryptocurrency trading, dividend reinvestment, fraud detection, derivatives, fractional shares, recurring investments, and others.

Founded in 2012, Coinbase is the leading cryptocurrency exchange platform in the United States. The company intends to be the safe and regulation-compliant point of entry for retail investors and institutions into the cryptocurrency economy. Users can establish an account directly with the firm, instead of using an intermediary, and many choose to allow Coinbase to act as a custodian for their cryptocurrency, giving the company breadth beyond that of a traditional financial exchange. While the company still generates the majority of its revenue from transaction fees charged to its retail customers, Coinbase uses internal investment and acquisitions to expand into adjacent businesses, such as prime brokerage and data analytics.

Interactive Brokers is a large, automated, retail and institutional brokerage that boasted nearly $780 billion in customer equity at the end of 2025. The company cut its teeth as a market maker, introducing US financial markets to automated and algorithmic training before expanding into brokerage services in 1993. The firm has a wide-ranging client base, with its best-in-class order execution and extremely low margin lending rates catering to a sophisticated audience of hedge funds, proprietary traders, and introducing brokers that account for about 45% of the firm’s commissions. With operations spanning more than 160 electronic exchanges, 36 countries, and 28 currencies, Interactive Brokers caters to a global clientele, with more than 80% of active accounts sitting outside the US.

LPL Financial is the largest US independent broker-dealer, with more than 32,000 financial advisors affiliated with its platform and roughly 11 million customer accounts at the end of 2025. The firm earns the bulk of its profit from interest income earned on client cash balances and from advisory fees and commissions tied to the $2.4 trillion in assets under management or advisory on its platform at year-end 2025. LPL specializes in the provision of turnkey wealth management services for affiliated independent advisors, but maintains a diverse array of affiliation modalities, running the gamut from more traditional employee models to a pure RIA custody approach. It earns tuck-in revenue from recordkeeping fees and the provision of software tools and services to its advisor base.

iCapital Network is a New York-headquartered fintech platform that equips wealth management firms, banks, and asset managers with technology for distributing private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and structured investments to high-net-worth individuals. Solutions cover digital enrollment, compliance monitoring, portfolio construction, risk analytics, and advisor training. The firm conducts fund due diligence through its research team and maintains offices in Zurich, London, Lisbon, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Toronto. iCapital Network earned Forbes FinTech 50 recognition from 2018 to 2022, Forbes America's Best Startup Employers in 2021 and 2022, and MMI/Barron’s Solutions Provider of the Year in 2020 and 2021. Founded in 2013, iCapital expanded via acquisitions from Deutsche Bank and Bank of America.

Carta is a San Francisco-headquartered transfer agent and equity management platform for private companies from seed to pre-IPO stages. The service digitizes stock certificates, options, warrants, and derivatives, providing real-time cap table visibility to shareholders, employees, auditors, and legal teams.

Wealthsimple is a Toronto-headquartered neobank offering automated investing, commission-free trading of stocks, ETFs, options, and cryptocurrencies, plus chequing accounts with 2.75 percent interest. Users build managed portfolios from $1 with 0.4-0.5 percent fees, file taxes via SimpleTax, and access credit cards. Serving 2 million Canadians, it holds banking licenses from major regulators.

StashAway is a Singapore-headquartered digital wealth manager using its proprietary ERAA framework for risk-managed portfolios across stocks, bonds, and alternatives. Available in Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong since 2016, it serves retail investors with automated rebalancing to adapt to economic regimes. The platform manages multi-asset strategies including ESG funds and fixed-income products.