First Derivatives
1-2A Marcus Square, Newry, Co. Down, BT34 1AY, United Kingdom
Overview
First Derivatives (FD) is a leading provider of products and consulting services to some of the world’s largest finance, technology and energy institutions. FD is the developer of the world-leading database technology kdb+. Focused on financial institutions that work cross-asset, often with multi-system and/or high volume trading activities, the Company scopes, designs, develops, implements and supports a broad range of mission critical data and trading systems across front, middle and back-office operations. The Company’s software is also used in a range of industries including telecoms, digital marketing, pharma and utilities to help organisations solve their most demanding data management and analytics challenges. Incorporated in 1996, FD has served the capital markets industry since its incorporation. The Company holds a niche market position in terms of domain knowledge of capital market asset classes (equities, fixed income, foreign exchange, commodities, etc), as well as expertise in leading financial services systems (such as Calypso, Murex, Opics, Summit, Principia, Opus, Wall Street, kdb+, etc). The Company continues to work closely with leading global financial institutions to enable client proprietary and 3rd Party systems cope with the demands of high volume, complex trading in an increasingly regulated market. This combination of domain knowledge and technical expertise in leading financial services technologies has motivated the Company to invest in developing its own product suite.
- Total investments
- 1
- Lead investments
- 0
- Investments · 12mo
- 0
- Active investors
- 8
Sector focus
- Accounting
- Banking
- Consulting
- Finance
- Financial Services
- Information Technology
- Management Consulting
- Software
Investment portfolio
- Crowdz
Participated · Series A · Jun 2019
Crowdz runs a fintech marketplace that buys receivables and offers invoice and recurring-revenue financing to SMEs, integrating with accounting, payment processing and banking systems. The company white-labels its platform to enterprises and financial institutions and says that white-label deals generate about 80% of its revenue. Crowdz makes money by taking basis points on dollars funded and is beginning to explore subscription models with its new recurring-revenue offering. The startup has financed $55 million in receivables by funding more than 20,000 invoices and has loaded roughly $2.2 billion of receivables onto its platform. It recently partnered with Facebook/Meta to finance up to $100 million in invoices for minority and diverse-owned U.S. businesses and aims to finance over $1 billion in receivables and help more than 25,000 SMEs by next year. Built on Ethereum since 2017, the company has filed 10 patents and emphasizes proprietary risk scoring and data science to underwrite receivables and recurring revenue. Crowdz operates a marketplace that enables businesses to sell unpaid invoices to investors in exchange for immediate cash. Led by founder and CEO Payson Johnston, the company integrates with accounting platforms including Intuit QuickBooks, Zoho Books and Xero. Crowdz is expanding its product roadmap to support SME growth and deliver additional offerings for enterprises and investors, including a proprietary SMART Score real-time risk assessment that uses inputs like Altman’s Z‑Score, probability of default and ESG metrics. The SMART Score is slated to be available as a standalone product in 2021 to help funders, banks and enterprises monitor receivables and supply-chain risk in real time. Crowdz is also developing a white‑label Supply Chain Finance as a Service (SCFaaS) and growing an in‑house finance facility launched during the pandemic to fully or partially fund invoices alongside platform investors. The company participates in the COVID‑19 Fintech Taskforce and has been a participant in the UK FCA Sandbox testing. Crowdz operates a blockchain-based Invoice Exchange and B2B payment gateway that digitizes invoices, speeds invoice-payment collections, and accelerates the cash-conversion cycle. Its platform automatically associates orders, invoices, and payments and includes a proprietary auction marketplace for financing. Through the auction platform, companies can submit invoices for bank or investor financing without additional paperwork and receive offers from dozens of funders. The company is led by co-founder and CEO Payson E. Johnston. Crowdz intends to use new funding for product development, marketing and sales, and key team hires. The business is based in San Jose, California.