Meet Midas, Turkey's first retail investing startup, which has raised $11M Spark Capital, Earlybird Digital East and Nigel Morris

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Feb 07, 2022, 01:00 ET

ISTANBUL, Feb. 7, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Midas, a retail investing startup that gives access to US and Turkish equities in Turkey, announced today that it has raised $11 million in equity funding.

The fundraise comes just 8 months after their inception, and is led by Spark Capital and Earlybird Digital East Fund, with Nigel Morris, Revo Capital also participating. This is one of the largest fintech seed investments to date in Turkey.

Midas launched with a large waitlist in April 2021, and over $100m has now been traded on the platform. In less than a year since launch, Midas now has a team of 70 people based in Istanbul. The funds will be used for launching cryptocurrency products, building infrastructure to power banks and neo-banks in their investment offerings, as well as growing the user base.

The first retail investment app in Turkey to offer low commission trading, fractional shares and US equities, Midas is investing heavily in educating the market by producing easy to digest financial content for free. The company offers detailed profiles on companies, a daily podcast, and a weekly newsletter to make sense of the markets.

Egem Eraslan, CEO and founder of Midas, commented "We started Midas to change people's relationship with money, for the better. The current environment in Turkey makes spending your money easy, but investing it, rather difficult. By building the most seamless investing experience, we are making investing effortless, as it should be."

Midas says it is the first licensed broker to make "download-to-first trade in less than 10 minutes" a reality in Turkey, down from the industry average of 5 days. The potential is huge, as Turkey is moving from mandatory physical KYC to video KYC soon, and Midas is right there to utilize it.

Over half of Midas users are first time investors and under 30. Nationally, 30% of all investors in Turkey are under 35, while in Midas 70% of the user base is within this age group. Egem Eraslan says "With a young and engaging user base and a superior product experience, we believe we are well positioned to build the future of investing in Turkey".

Different from many other retail trading apps, Midas is building infrastructure to power the entire industry. Already partnered with one of the largest banks in Turkey, Midas wants to help banks and neo-banks offer the best investment products to their customers.

Egem Eraslan: "We want neobanks to also utilize the Midas infrastructure to offer better investment products for their customers at the lowest costs. We believe every consumer finance company should work on growing their customer's wealth, and Midas is here to help."

The startup touts its "product stack approach", targeting to solve the most difficult problems through building infrastructure early on.

"Over the last decade, we have seen the rise of modern mobile investing platforms globally. However, emerging markets have remained out of reach for large well-known players due to the local requirements that result in high barriers to entry. This leaves a unique opportunity in these markets, where both offline and online dynamics are extremely in favor of fast growth - as the penetration rate of financial instruments has been historically low and online customers are underserved" stated Mehmet Atici, Partner at Earlybird Digital East. "We believe Midas is in an exceptionally strong position to address this uniquely large and untapped opportunity, and become the leading platform for investing & wealth management in emerging markets. We are excited to back Egem and the team on their journey."

About Midas

Midas is Turkey's first fully digital stock brokerage app, enabling investors to invest in both the Turkish and the US stock markets. Midas offers low transaction fees for investments in US stocks, fractional investing and free live market data. The Borsa Istanbul (Turkish stock market) product is in closed beta and will soon launch to offer commission-free trading of Turkish stocks.

Prior to Midas, Turkish residents did not have the opportunity to invest in popular US stocks for many reasons, ranging from high minimum balance requirements to expensive transaction fees ($25 per transaction with $25.000 minimum balance requirements). And when it comes to Turkish stocks, there isn't a mobile product that appeals to millennials. Midas emerged from a realization that there was a need to provide this mobile savvy population with a great investing experience.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1740371/Midas_Team.jpg

SOURCE Midas