Lemon.markets, a Berlin-headquartered Fintech firm that helps companies embed trading services through APIs, has secured €15 million via a seed funding round that was co-led by Lakestar and Lightspeed.
Creandum and System.one took part in the investment round, along with contributions from angels (like N26 and Stripe).
Established in 2020, lemon.markets aims to help developers with building their own brokerage experience by using its Rest-API for stock trading and market data.
Companies may build their own automated trading bot, monitor price developments and set their own buy and sell rules.
21-year-old CEO Max Linden stated:
“European brokerage is ripe for disruption. We strongly believe that every tech company should be able to embed financial services into their offering and lemon.markets wants to facilitate that. The demand is already there. Our infrastructure solution takes care of all the plumbing, so developers in these companies can dedicate their focus on creating value for users.”
Since its launch, lemon.markets has been rooted within a strong community of developers and collaborates on developing various use-cases with them.
lemon.markets’ features are co-developed by its users, including software development kits that wrap around the firm’s API.
Users have been carrying out trades in closed alpha, helping to shape the product before its commercial roll-out in Q2 2022.
Leveraging lemon.markets’ footprint in the developer community offers a systematic approach for the firm to serve as the go-to partner for companies in introducing a stock trading product.
This enables lemon.markets to create what developers require to reshape what brokerage is, one line of source code at a time.
This latest capital injection will be channeled towards accelerating this roadmap, supporting further product development and extending its usage to firms that want to integrate stock trading into their services.
The Fintech will also aim to focus on bringing more talent into the team and enhancing its in-house regulatory expertise as it scales and enhances its offering.
Lakestar Partner Nicolas Brand stated:
“lemon.markets is providing tech companies the technical and regulatory infrastructure to integrate brokerage in their products – all through a single API. With companies facing increasing regulatory, compliance and structural hurdles, lemon.markets abstracts these complexities away for their customers through technology. The current technical infrastructure that makes up our world of finance is being rebuilt entirely.”
Creandum General Partner Simon Schmincke remarked:
“Max and the lemon.markets team are creating the next generation of fintech: laying the infrastructure that will power the next generation of equity trading products, and enriching existing products with equity investing capabilities. Their API first product is leading the charge in making brokerage universally accessible and adaptable. Seeing Max thrive over the last months strengthened our belief to back lemon.markets in this round.”