PrimaryBid founder and CEO Anand Sambasivan
(Picture: PrimaryBid)Japanese investment giant SoftBank has backed the tech platform that helped thousands of small-time investors buy into Deliveroo’s IPO.
London-based startup PrimaryBid has raised $190 million (£140 million) in an investment round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2. The startup is understood to be valued at around $700 million in the deal.
PrimaryBid’s tech lets companies sell shares to retail investors during stock market listings and rights issues. These large transactions have traditionally been the preserve of big institutions because of the complexity and cost of dealing with lots of small-time investors.
To date, PrimaryBid’s platform has helped companies raise more than $1 billion across 200 transactions.
The company’s most high-profile deal in the UK was supporting Deliveroo’s disastrous IPO in March 2021. Around 70,000 investors bought £50 million-worth of stock at the 390p IPO price using PrimaryBid’s tech. Deliveroo shares sank 30% on the first day of trade and are now down by two thirds since listing. PrimaryBid had no involvement in the pricing.
PrimaryBid CEO and founder Anand Sambasivan said: “Any single deal, you can look at it and tell your own story.” He said the majority of offerings on the platform have done well.
SoftBank joins the London Stock Exchange Group and Fidelity in backing PrimaryBid, alongside venture capital investors including Molten and OMERS.
Sambasivan, a former investment banker, said the SoftBank deal was strategic as well as financial. SoftBank’s portfolio of investments could give PrimaryBid a pipeline of IPOs to potentially work on, he said. Other SoftBank investments including Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart and celebrity video message platform Cameo.
PrimaryBid will use the new cash to “scale across the EU extremely quickly” and launch in the US, Sambasivan said. It has already launched in France and struck deals with Dutch bank ABN AMRO and exchange operator Euronext.
Expansion in the US will take longer due to regulation but Sambasivan said PrimaryBid hoped to do more “Soho House-type deals” in the meantime. The company worked with parent organisation the Membership Collective Group on its New York listing last summer, offering IPO stock to Soho House members in the UK.
Sambasivan said there were “very obvious” companies eyeing IPOs in the US that PrimaryBid could do something similar with, offering US IPO shares to UK and European customers.
“If you look at Reddit, that’s the sort of company we would love to work with,” he said, stressing interest was theoretical and no talks were ongoing.
