Reda Falih is an engineer, trader, investor and entrepreneur. He’s the CEO of Aries, a retail-focused brokerage.
Falih will participate in the upcoming Fintech Deal Day in New York City on Nov. 13. He will moderate the topic titled “Unleashing the Potential of Full Technology Ecosystems.”
Falih ventured into trading as a teenager, running a popular value investment blog and launching a SaaS data company that democratized access to previously highly-priced options data.
Using the clients’ feedback, he launched Aries, the first Generation 3 trading platform that won Zenger News’s Fintech Award in 2021. This retail-focused, discount-priced brokerage offers access to stocks, options, futures, index options, ETFs, IPOs and crypto at prices 75% less expensive than its closest competitor.
So far, Aries cleared numerous milestones. It successfully closed the VC lead pre-seed funding round, expanded its presence to 130 countries and signed agreements with household names such as Apex Fintech Solutions and ClickIPO.
In an earlier interview for Zenger News, Falih stated his initial target was to build a Robinhood for international users, as his team thought that the domestic market might be saturated.
“To our surprise, we’ve seen a massive amount of our users come from the United States, and … we’ve been consistent since then,” said Falih.
In 2022, Aries market customers grew by almost 600%. In a more recent interview for Hubtas, Falih attributed this success to their superior infrastructure.
“We’re competing against companies who have billions of dollars, but they were also built in like 2005- 2010, and when you built something 10 years ago, it had a bunch of spaghetti code,” said Falih.
“With Aries, because we’ve built really lightweight modern infrastructure, we can start taking these tools and building them on top of the data that we’re already pushing out to the front end. That resonated with our client base because why would you go pay $200 a month for this data tool if you get it for free on Aries,” he added.
Aries is currently organically growing at 10% month over month, and it has been raising money for further expansion by crowdfunding through StartEngine. So far, the platform raised more than $450,000 at a valuation of $24.96 million.
“We want the values at Aries to be 100% client-focused. Aries will be the people’s broker owned by the people,” Falih stated for Zenger.
© 2023 Zenger News.com. Zenger News does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
Produced in association with Benzinga
