2023 in Review: Five Years of Clear Street

Clear Street is the cloud-native prime broker transforming capital markets. Our mission is simple - to build a modern, all-in-one platform capable of servicing all investor types across all asset classes globally.

Our team has made incredible strides since Sachin Kumar, Uri Cohen, and I founded Clear Street back in 2018. This year we’re celebrating our fifth year anniversary, and I’m excited to share highlights from 2023 and how we’ve grown across our business, product, and people.

There’s so much to say that a blog post can’t capture everything. I invite you to read our full 2023 year in review here and listen to the first episode of our new podcast, Word on the (Clear) Street, to learn how Clear Street started.

Business

Clear Street’s business thrived this year. We’re hard at work strengthening our capital base and building our leadership bench to expand into new asset classes, geographies, and client personas.

A number of senior executives joined the team in 2023 to spearhead this growth, including Chief Information Officer Jon Dapyln, Chief Financial Officer Steve Bisgay, Chief Administrative Officer Kevin McCarthy, and several other senior leaders from across finance and technology.

In February, we were thrilled to announce a strategic investment from IMC Investments, the venture capital arm of the proprietary trading firm and global market marker IMC. In April, we received a $270 million investment from Prysm Capital, successfully closing the second tranche of our $435 million Series B funding and bringing our total valuation to $2 billion. Thank you to the Prysm Capital team for your continued support and partnership.

In June, we welcomed a team of investment bankers who are already in the market with a broad suite of financial solutions, including equity and debt capital markets, M&A advisory, and corporate access.

These strategic partnerships and business developments are just the tip of the iceberg for 2023. On a daily basis, our platform is now processing around 2.5% of the notional U.S. equities volume, which is roughly $15 billion worth of activity through our platforms.

Our client pipeline has grown exponentially, too — we’ve onboarded more than 160 institutional prime brokerage clients in the last 12 months. For the first time, we were named to Hedge Fund Alert’s list of Top Prime Brokers of Hedge Funds.

Product

On the product side, we’ve been working nonstop to expand our services and capabilities. In 2023, we developed more than 6,000 production releases to support three client product launches. Our product offering uniquely positions Clear Street to provide our clients with technology-driven solutions that improve efficiencies.

A key milestone this year was the release of fixed-income clearing and custody. While it can take years to natively add new asset classes, we built fixed-income capabilities on our platform in just six months. This was only possible because of Clear Street’s cloud-native, event-driven, and horizontally scalable platform.

Through strategic organic and inorganic development, we’re moving closer to one platform for clients to clear, custody, execute, and finance across all major asset classes. In July, we acquired React Consulting Services and its proprietary, cloud-native futures clearing platform, BASIS. Once the platform is fully integrated, Clear Street will service clients in U.S. equities, options, fixed-income, and futures.

People

It’s all possible thanks to Clear Street’s incredible people. Earlier this year, we were proud to unveil Clear Street’s values - guiding principles that see us through challenges, opportunities, successes, and failures as we achieve our goals. In 2023, we lived those values every day.

Clear Street donated over $420,000 to 11 charitable organizations, including Camp-Mak-A-Dream, A Leg to Stand On, and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. We welcomed more than 100 new employees in engineering, sales, trading, and more. As a team, we came together for Clear Street Connect days, yoga classes, happy hours, ping-pong, and engineering fix-it days.

We’re just getting started

Amid all these developments, teams across Clear Street are focused on building our flagship product - Clear Street Studio.

Currently in private beta, Clear Street Studio will allow managers to access risk and margin, exposures, P&L, and analytics reports at the touch of a button. We've spent years building our cloud-native platform for clearing, custody, risk, execution, and securities finance. Now, we’re building products on that platform.

Thank you for following us on our journey! Together, we will continue to do great things in 2024 and beyond.

Read Clear Street's 2023 Year in Review.