To meet Light year, a new London-based startup moving out of stealth today. The company is building a stock trading app with an emphasis on creating a truly commission-free app. In addition to charging account and trading fees, Lightyear doesn’t charge any foreign exchange fees either – up to a point.
The two founders met while working at Wise – known then as TransferWise. So it makes sense that Lightyear would like to stand out from the crowd with lower foreign exchange fees.
Martin Sokk, Co-Founder and CEO of Lightyear, worked at Wise between 2012 and 2017. He held various functions such as product manager, human resources manager and operations manager. Mihkel Aamer, Lightyear’s other co-founder and CTO, served as the technical lead at Wise between 2013 and 2019.
“After my career in financial services, I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. I believe retail investing in Europe is still very “the ugly” – we’re talking about sneaky fees, less access and complicated products that remain as the status quo, “Martin Sokk said in a statement. “We’re building something that will change that by opening up investment to everyone, no matter what global market they want to invest in and how much they want to invest.”
As a user, you can expect a mobile app with which you can buy and sell stocks and ETFs. At launch, there will be 1,500 stocks and ETFs from multiple markets. Customers do not pay account, trading and foreign exchange fees. However, there will be a cap on foreign exchange fees. After £ 3,000 per month, users pay 0.35% in FX fees.
The app isn’t quite ready as Lightyear is opening a waiting list today. The product is slated to hit the market sometime in the third quarter of this year.
Credit: Light year
Lightyear has raised a $ 1.5 million pre-seed funding round led by the new undisclosed fund founded by Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus and Teleport co-founder Sten Tamkivi Teleport. This is their first investment from this new company. Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn is also the co-head of Found by Metaplanet. Several business angels are also participating in today’s funding round, including Ott Kaukver, CTO of Checkout.com, former President of Robinhood UK Wander Rutgers, and Veriff founder Kaarel Kotkas.
It’s a nice list of investors, but the company will face stiff competition from other startups – you will likely pay more fees using any of these competitors, but they are already well-established. For example the Berlin stock trading app Commercial republic recently raised $ 900 million. In the United Kingdom, Free trade also managed to attract 600,000 users.
More importantly, however, Lightyear also competes with legacy brokers. Unlike in the US, the vast majority of retail investors still rely on traditional banks and web platforms to trade stocks. There will be space for more than one company here. Let’s see how Lightyear develops in the coming months.