lemon.markets Secures €15M in Seed Financing to Launch a Stock Trading API for Developers, Paving the Way for a New Era of European Brokerage

  • APIs , Fundraising News
  • 04.04.2022 10:10 am
  • €15M seed funding co-led by Lakestar and Lightspeed, with participation from Creandum and System.one, as well as angel investors from companies including N26, Public.com, sennder, Taxfix, Finoa and Stripe
  • lemon.markets to launch its industry-disrupting stock trading API in Germany, with further markets to follow
  • The fresh capital will be used to continue driving product development and growing its team, particularly building its regulatory expertise 

lemon.markets, a financial technology company offering an easy-to-use API for stock trading, today announced €15M in seed financing to launch its pioneering brokerage platform for developers and tech companies. Co-led by leading investment firms Lakestar and Lightspeed, with participation from Creandum and System.one, it is one of the largest seed funding rounds in Europe. Angel investors in the round include operators from N26, Public.com, sennder, Taxfix, Finoa and Stripe. The financing signals lemon.markets’ strong trajectory on its path to facilitate brokerage services across Europe.

lemon.markets will use the funding to accelerate its product development, extending its usage to businesses that wish to integrate stock trading into their services. Seizing the opportunity in embedded finance, the company will focus on bringing great talent onboard the already rapidly growing team. It will especially focus on strengthening its in-house regulatory knowledge as it scales and enhances its offering.

Stock trading is becoming an indispensable part of today’s world. 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. 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. 

That’s why lemon.markets presents itself as an API-first company, offering a stock trading API geared towards developers. As retail investing becomes widespread, more and more people are looking for tailored solutions, creating a demand for infrastructure that enables personalised portfolio trackers, trading automations, custom saving plans, and the vision doesn’t stop there. lemon.markets will be the go-to choice for developers wishing to launch these projects to a wider non-technical audience. 

Quickly becoming the leading brokerage-as-a-service provider in Europe, lemon.markets’ vision is to expand across the continent and provide the rails for any European to invest. The use-cases for its API are endless: from empowering every neobank to offer stock trading as a convenient feature to reinvesting tax refunds to automatically investing the roundup of payments. lemon.markets believes we won’t be seeing the endgame of retail investing anytime soon.

Since its inception, lemon.markets has been deeply rooted within a strong community of developers and intensively collaborates on creating new use-cases with them. lemon.markets’ features are co-designed by its users, including software development kits (SDKs) that wrap around the company’s API. Users have been executing trades in closed alpha, helping to shape the product before its full commercial launch in Q2 2022. Leveraging lemon.markets’ strong footprint in the developer community provides a systematic approach for the company to become the go-to-partner for businesses in launching a stock trading product. This allows lemon.markets to build exactly what developers need to reshape what brokerage is, one line of code at a time.

“European brokerage is ripe for disruption. We strongly believe that every tech company should be able to embed financial services into their offering and lemon.markets wants to facilitate that. 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,” says Co-founder and CEO, Max Linden.

“lemon.markets 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. The current technical infrastructure that makes up our world of finance is being rebuilt entirely,” says Lakestar Partner Nicolas Brand.

"We're thrilled to be backing the lemon.markets team as their product and mission fits squarely within our thesis of embedded finance." says Justin Overdorff, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. "lemon.markets bottom-up developer focused go-to-market strategy allows it to partner with the very 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."

“Max and the lemon.markets team are creating the next generation of fintech: laying the infrastructure that will power the next generation of equity trading products, and enriching existing products with equity investing capabilities. Their API first product is leading the charge in making brokerage universally accessible and adaptable. Seeing Max thrive over the last months strengthened our belief to back lemon.markets in this round.” says Creandum General Partner Simon Schmincke.

Related News