Pico will benefit from Intel Capital’s strong expertise in disruptive technology innovation and value-added approach to accelerate its next phase of growth
Pico, a leading provider of technology services for the global financial markets community, today announced it recently closed on a strategic investment with Intel Capital, Intel Corporation’s global investment organization. This completes Pico’s $135M Series C investment round that will be used to further fuel Pico’s global growth and expansion plans.
“We are honored and proud to have Intel Capital join as an investor and to reach this important funding milestone which is supporting our ongoing growth and global expansion,” said Jarrod Yuster, Pico Chairman, Founder and Co-CEO. “The strengthening of our balance sheet will continue to allow us to realize our differentiating strategy of investing in building the most globally comprehensive, robust, scalable and high-performance infrastructure in the financial services industry that meets clients current and future needs.”
The advancements and investments Pico has made over the past 24 months in strengthening its platform and global reach continue to give clients a competitive edge in this unprecedented time with extreme volatility, peak message rates and exponential network traffic growth. These investments include increased capacity, resiliency and diversity of its global financial services network, PicoNet™. In addition to introducing 100 Gigabit per second native bandwidth access underpinned by a pure optical backbone network, Pico’s real-time and machine intelligence solution Corvil Analytics, is now enabled for 100Gb networks to monitor new higher throughput environments. The continued investments will also allow Pico to bolster its award-winning platform with automation tools for quicker and deterministic delivery with accuracy and oversight.
Joining Intel Capital’s list of portfolio companies further enhances Pico’s growth trajectory with opportunities to build on its deep technology heritage to advance the capabilities that create new and differentiated value propositions for clients.
Yuster continues: “Intel is a performance leader, and we are excited to have them as an investor in the next phase of our evolution. We are looking forward to benefitting from their vast technology experience to accelerate AI, big data and analytics-based innovation that will deliver a performance advantage to our clients.”
The Intel Xeon processor has been at the core of Corvil Analytics’ market-leading performance and capabilities for over fifteen years. Pico recently introduced Intel’s 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable platform with built-in AI acceleration in its fifth-generation analytics appliance family bringing new benchmarks in performance and price improvement to its clients. With this latest funding round, Pico and Intel will collaborate to deliver a 100Gbps network data capture and real-time streaming analytics platform for Financial Markets trading. Early-stage development is also underway around building a financial services lab, where Pico and Intel can work with top clients to incubate new concepts around AI processing, Machine Learning, Network and Trade Analytics, and Cloud Monitoring.
“Fintech’s impact on capital markets continues to grow and those who successfully tap technological innovations can transform their competitiveness,” said Andy Fligel, Senior Managing Director, at Intel Capital. “Pico’s track record of innovation and strategic roadmap with Intel technology at its foundation should deliver low-latency high throughput process automation, machine learning and advanced analytics for the financial services industry. We look forward to playing an active role in their success.”
In addition to Intel Capital, also joining the round are strategic partner EDBI, a global Asian-based investor as announced previously, and new investor CreditEase Fintech Investment Fund. Other key strategic investors and Pico clients include Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Wells Fargo, UBS, Nomura, DRW Venture Capital, Chicago Trading Company, Capital Markets Trading and Simplex Investments.
