Who invests in trading startups
AngelMatch tracks 500+ investors tagged to trading, covering everyone from individual angels to investment banks and private equity investors who back trading platforms, market infrastructure, brokerages and the software that powers them. That's a different mix than you'll see on most market pages. Angel individuals still make up the largest single group, but private equity investors and investment banks show up here in far bigger numbers than they do on, say, a consumer app or an education page.
That mix makes sense once you think about who actually understands trading well enough to write a check. A good chunk of the people funding trading startups spent years on a trading desk, at a broker or inside a fund before they started investing. They're not learning the space from your pitch deck, they already live in it.
Venture capitalists are still active here too, alongside a smaller group of hedge funds and finance operators who invest personally. If your startup touches market data, order execution, compliance tooling or trading infrastructure, this is a pool of checks worth working through carefully rather than blasting with a generic email.
That background also shapes what these investors expect from a founding team. A finance-heavy investor base tends to want at least one person on the founding team who's actually worked in markets, whether that's on a desk, at an exchange or inside a broker's compliance department. It's not a hard requirement, but a team with zero trading or market-structure experience has a steeper hill to climb here than it would pitching a generalist consumer app to a generalist fund.
The category is also getting more attention from capital markets generally, not just from the investors on this list. Trading was fintech's fastest-growing sub-sector over the past couple of years by dollars raised, pulling in $8.0 billion in venture funding in 2025 and producing 79 new unicorns, according to VC data tracker Dealroom. That growth is concentrated in a handful of large late-stage deals in crypto exchanges and prediction markets, so don't read it as a sign that early checks have gotten any easier to find. It does mean more investors are paying attention to the category than they were two years ago.
What trading investors actually back
Trading is a broad tag on AngelMatch, and the investors in it back a wider range of companies than the name suggests. Retail and pro trading platforms and apps are the most obvious fit, but a lot of the same investors also fund market data and analytics tools, order execution and routing infrastructure and the compliance and risk software that brokerages and exchanges are required to run. Robo-advisory and wealth management tools that blend investing with trading show up here too, since the line between "invest" and "trade" keeps blurring as more of that activity moves onto consumer apps.
Crypto and digital-asset trading is its own growing slice inside this group, pulling in investors who wouldn't touch a traditional equities platform but understand exchange mechanics and liquidity provisioning well. If that's closer to what you're building, it's worth also checking cryptocurrency investors and investment management investors alongside this list, since the three groups overlap more than most market pairs on AngelMatch do. Before you start reaching out, it's worth pulling a fuller list from the investor database so you're working from every trading-adjacent investor at once instead of switching between three separate pages.
Where trading investors are based
About half of the investors on this list are based in the United States, with the rest split mostly across the United Kingdom, India, Singapore and Australia. Inside the US, New York City is the single biggest hub by a wide margin, which tracks with where trading desks, brokers and exchanges have always clustered. San Francisco and Chicago follow, the former for fintech-focused VCs and the latter for its deep bench of proprietary trading firms and market makers who increasingly write checks into the tools their own industry uses.
Outside the US, London is the clearest concentration, reflecting the City's own long history with trading floors and market infrastructure. India and Singapore round out the top five countries, both home to fast-growing brokerage and trading-app markets of their own rather than just outposts of US or UK funds. If you're fundraising outside your home market, London and New York are the two cities where a trading pitch lands with the least explaining, since investors there already share your vocabulary.
What stage trading investors write checks at
Seed is where most of the activity sits, with early stage venture and pre-seed checks following close behind. Later stages thin out fast, which matches a broader pattern in trading and market-infrastructure funding right now: capital is concentrating into fewer, larger rounds at the growth end while a lot of new money keeps flowing into early-stage bets on the next wave of trading tools. If you're pre-seed or seed, you're pitching into the part of the market that's actually most active, not the leftover end of it.
Check sizes here don't differ much from the rest of the startup world. Angel investors in trading generally write checks between $25,000 and $500,000, while venture checks run from $2 million up to $100 million or more once a company is further along. Dilution at an early round typically lands around 15% to 25%, so the math on how many investors you actually need is the same whether you're building a trading app or a logistics platform. What changes is who's writing the check, not how big it is.
How to pitch a trading investor
Because so many trading investors came out of the industry themselves, generic fundraising advice mostly wastes their time and yours. Skip the market-sizing slide that explains what a trading platform is. They know. What they want to see fast is your edge: your data source, your latency, your regulatory position or the distribution wedge that gets you users a brokerage or bank can't easily copy.
Timing matters more here than in most markets. A lot of your list works on a desk or inside a fund, which means their calendars run on market hours and earnings cycles, not startup-fundraising cycles. Late Friday afternoons and the last two weeks of December are close to dead. Quiet mid-week mornings before the US market opens tend to get read, and the days right after a big earnings season wraps up tend to be easier to book a call than the days during it.
Regulatory posture is worth putting up front rather than saving for diligence. An investor who's spent years around brokers and exchanges will ask about your licensing status, your data agreements and your compliance plan before they ask about your growth rate, so having clear answers ready in the first meeting builds trust fast with this particular audience.
Once you've got a shortlist, the fastest way to stop losing track of who you've emailed and who's gone quiet is to run your outreach through a fundraising CRM instead of a spreadsheet, especially once you're juggling investors across three time zones.
With 500+ trading investors to work through and a mix that skews toward people who already know the space, your best move isn't a wider net, it's a sharper pitch aimed at the operators, banks and funds who'll actually get why your edge matters. Start with the ones closest to your own city or your own corner of the market, since a warm-ish intro through a shared background still beats a cold email every time.
Trading platform investors
