Barclays has joined in a Series A funding round for Beacon Platform, which offers a a suite of applications for financial software development teams.
Founded in 2014, Beacon was founded by Kirat Singh and Mark Higgins, both of whom helped build risk and analytics platforms at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Bank of America Merril Lynch.
Similar to Goldman's SecDB at core, Beacon also offers a development functionality that enables coders at insitutional licensees to develop, customise and implement analytics and apps. The firm's clients include global investment banks, asset managers, insurance companies, and commodities trading firms.
COO, Mark Higgins says:: “The Series A funding round represents an important milestone in Beacon’s vision of building the first operating system for finance: an ecosystem where quantitative developers, engineers, data scientists, and front-office users can collaborate and innovate within their own controlled, secure, cloud-based platform environment."
Beacon has not disclosed the size of the funding, which was led by Pimco and included Global Atlantic alongside Barclays.
Guy Saidenberg, global head of distribution and structuring at Barclays says: “Work to date conducted by our developers and data scientists has demonstrated significant potential for the platform. We look forward to helping further improve these tools as the ability to leverage data and digital assets becomes increasingly important in the financial services industry.”