Trading.TV, a social live stream and immersive chat platform for traders and financial content creators, announced Thursday that it raised $8 million in a funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Trading.TV is launching an iOS, Android and desktop platform as well. Benzinga spoke with Trading.TV CEO and founder Tobias Heaslip.
Context: Heaslip is a financial markets veteran who spent nearly a decade in analysis and trading at large buy- and sell-side institutions.
Having helped take Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), Groupon Inc (NASDAQ:GRPN), and Snap Inc (NYSE:SNAP), among others, public, the founder said he saw a unique opportunity given advances in market structure and engagement on social media platforms.
“As a trader, you’re always looking for the next big secular theme,” he said. “In 2019, I started to feel like there were two main secular trends that were going to last for at least 10 years.”
The first was the emergence of the creator economy — individuals monetizing the pursuit of their passion — and the retail revolution with respect to the democratization of stock and alternative asset trading via platforms like Robinhood, Coinbase and Rarible.
That thesis fed into the inception of Trading.TV in 2020, the fintech love child of Amazon Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN)-owned Twitch and Salesforce Inc (NYSE:CRM)-owned Slack.
“We’re the world’s first social live stream and immersive chat platform for traders and financial content creators,” Heaslip said of platform content spanning everything from stocks and options to cryptocurrency, NFTs, trading cards and sneakers.
“Creators come on the platform, create content via live stream and on-demand video, and there’s immersive chat.”
Updates: Nearly a half-year after launching a desktop web app as proof of concept, Trading.TV is launching a full mobile app experience.
At the outset, the app will allow users to buy and sell stocks directly from live streams. Later, crypto, NFTs and collectibles assets may be added.
“We learned that our audience is younger and mobile-first,” Heaslip said of the firm’s early pivot and the addition of short-form content with asset tags. “It’s a mechanism to familiarize new users with creators … it is a challenge in getting users to watch longer-format content, initially, because they’re coming to the platform for the first time.”
Heaslip gave the example of a creator making a 90-second video expressing their opinion on Facebook stock. Other users can view the same video and directly trade on that information.
“The hope is that then leads to a higher conversion for people to watch a longer-form video where obviously the creator has the opportunity to give much more detailed information.”
During early development, Trading.TV also discovered new ways to monetize beyond collecting a tax on tips and donations.
This includes advertising and potentially hosting community-building initiatives for listed companies.
“We’ve just been inundated with B2B partnership initiatives because there’s not a platform that allows companies to get their narrative out and build community and advertise at will.”
Visions: Going forward, the use of this funding round’s proceeds is predicated on community feedback.
“Whether you have 10 or 100,000 users, the most important thing is to develop a sticky product.”
In providing an incentive to new and existing users to join, create, communicate and trade, Trading.TV is looking to NFT tokens and rebates.
“We’ve toyed with the idea of providing rebates to users based on trades,” Heaslip said. “Our belief is that we should find a way for all parties to be participatory in the revenue stream.”
At the end of the day, Trading.TV merges the content creation on platforms like TikTok and Instagram with live trading, making it an education-focused onramp to navigating volatile markets.
Bonus: Creators that have committed themselves to Trading.TV include Group Chat, Asset Entities, OBR Investing, Nick Black, Bruno Crypto, Kamal Hubbard and Christon “The Truth” Jones.
The company plans to grow its existing $1-million creator fund by funding it with up to 10% of its total platform revenue. The goal is to make creators on TTV the highest-paid on the internet.
