The increased demand for financial freedom, low interest rates and shifts in equity culture, are encouraging companies to incorporate brokerage services into their offering. Eventually, brokerage services will be inescapable, with every major tech company providing their customers the means to participate in the stock market. Hence, stock trading is here to stay.
However, the technology and infrastructure needed to build and integrate these brokerage services is nascent in Europe. A stable and reliable trading API, designed specifically for developers, is noticeably absent in the market.
Enter Berlin-based Lemon.markets, which offers an easy-to-use API for stock trading and has now raised €15 million funding to launch its brokerage platform for developers and tech companies.
The seed financing round was co-led by investment firms Lakestar and Lightspeed, with participation from Creandum and System.one. Angel investors in the round include operators from N26, Public.com, sennder, Taxfix, Finoa and Stripe.
Seizing the opportunity in embedded finance, the neo-brokerage firm will use the funding to accelerate its product development, extending its usage to businesses that wish to integrate stock trading into their services. It will also focus on strengthening its in-house regulatory knowledge team as it scales and enhances its offering.
Founded in 2020, the platform offers frictionless trading, reliable market data and a vivid developer community with no hidden costs. It powers personalised savings plans and automated trading strategies. Going forward, it plans to enable neobanks to embed stock trading in their product and contextual use cases like reinvesting tax refunds.
Max Linden, co-founder and CEO, lemon.markets said: “European brokerage is ripe for disruption. Every tech company should be able to embed financial services into their offering and lemon.markets wants to facilitate this. The demand is already there. Our infrastructure solution takes care of all the plumbing, so developers in these companies can dedicate their focus on creating value for users. We can’t wait to see the many different ways our API will be applied.”
Nicolas Brand, partner, Lakestar said: “The platform is providing tech companies the technical and regulatory infrastructure to integrate brokerage in their products - all through a single API. With companies facing increasing regulatory, compliance and structural hurdles, lemon.markets abstracts these complexities away for their customers through technology.”
Justin Overdorffv, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners added: "The startup’s bottom-up developer focused go-to-market strategy allows it to partner with the best developers and companies building innovative and best in class products in the brokerage and securities trading space. An important part of their offering will be to scale those infrastructure products throughout Europe, setting the foundations for the next era of financial services across the continent."
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