This year, Public had celebrated its five-year anniversary and it has been nearly four since the Series D. And the company also announced new financing totaling $135 million, including $105 million in equity financing and $30 million in debt.
This funding round was again led by Accel, which has led or co-led every funding round since launching in 2019. The company’s platform and company have matured significantly since the last funding round.
The company started as a “social stock trading app” in 2019. It has now become a powerful investing platform offering 5 different asset classes, deep fundamental research tools, and sophisticated portfolio management.
AI is now better at offering many of the benefits that the company’s social features used to provide. And the company’s embedded AI research agent Alpha is used by 90%+ of members, who now receive real-time context about what is happening in the markets. Public sees that 25% of Alpha conversations result in a trade within 3 hours.
The business attracts billions in deposits annually, and most customers consolidate their investments with Public, making the platform their primary portfolio.
Public’s core brokerage business is profitable, with over 10 significant revenue streams. And the company is continuing to expand the platform with more asset classes, account types, and AI-powered features that help investors build their portfolios and understand the markets.
As the company scaled AUM into the billions over the past few years, they have found that the time required to double AUM continues to shrink, now taking less than a year. And this is driven by having very little churn, customer lifetimes measured in decades, and by each new customer cohort depositing more than the last. Public is also seeing an increasing share of wallet from both new and existing customers, who are consolidating their assets onto the platform and making Public their primary portfolio.
KEY QUOTE:
“We ship improvements daily and launch at least one major new product every month. However, product velocity is meaningless without reliability; it’s not just about how much you ship but how well it works. We’re especially proud that, over the past twelve months, the Public platform has had only 30 minutes of cumulative downtime. To put that in perspective, the top five incumbent brokerages experience, on average, two incidents every trading day.”
— Jannick Malling and Leif Abraham, Co-founders & Co-CEOs, Public
