Midas raised $11m in equity funding just eight months after its launch

By Joy Dumasia

Midas, a retail investing startup that gives access to US and Turkish equities in Turkey, announced that it had raised $11 million in equity funding. The fundraise comes just 8 months after its inception and is led by Spark Capital and Earlybird Digital East Fund, with Nigel Morris and Revo Capital also participating. This is one of Turkey’s most significant FinTech seed investments to date.

Midas launched with an extensive waitlist in April 2021, and over $100m has now been traded on the platform. In less than a year since launch, Midas now has 70 people based in Istanbul. The funds will be used to launch cryptocurrency products, build infrastructure to power banks and neo-banks in their investment offerings, and grow the user base. 

The first retail investment app in Turkey to offer low commission trading, fractional shares and US equities, Midas is investing heavily in educating the market by producing easy to digest financial content for free. The company offers detailed profiles on companies, a daily podcast, and a weekly newsletter to make sense of the markets.

Egem Eraslan, CEO and founder of Midas, commented: “We started Midas to change people’s relationship with money, for the better. The current environment in Turkey makes spending your money easy, but investing it, rather difficult. By building the most seamless investing experience, we are making investing effortless, as it should be.”

Over half of Midas users are first-time investors and under 30. Nationally, 30% of all investors in Turkey are under 35, while in Midas, 70% of the user base is within this age group. Egem Eraslan says, “With a young and engaging user base and a superior product experience, we believe we are well-positioned to build the future of investing in Turkey.”

Egem Eraslan: “We want neobanks to also utilize the Midas infrastructure to offer better investment products for their customers at the lowest costs. We believe every consumer finance company should work on growing their customer’s wealth, and Midas is here to help.”

Mehmet Atici, partner at Earlybird Digital East, said: “Over the last decade, we have seen the rise of modern mobile investing platforms globally. However, emerging markets have remained out of reach for large well-known players due to the local requirements that result in high barriers to entry. This leaves a unique opportunity in these markets, where both offline and online dynamics are extremely in favor of fast growth – as the penetration rate of financial instruments has been historically low and online customers are underserved. We believe Midas is in an exceptionally strong position to address this uniquely large and untapped opportunity and become the leading platform for investing & wealth management in emerging markets. We are excited to back Egem and the team on their journey.”