Pico completes $135mn Series funding, names Intel Capital as a new investor

By Pavithra R

PICO, a leading provider of technology services for financial markets community, has announced securing a strategic investment from Intel Capital, Intel Corporation’s global investment organization. The investment completes Pico’s $135mn Series C funding 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. 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,” said Jarrod Yuster, Pico Chairman, Founder and Co-CEO.

The finance round saw participation from strategic partner EDBI, a global Asian-based investor, and new investor CreditEase FinTech Investment Fund. Other key strategic investors and Pico clients include J.P. Morgan, Wells Fargo, UBS, Nomura, DRW Venture Capital, Goldman Sachs, Chicago Trading Company, Capital Markets Trading and Simplex Investments.

Pico’s advancements and investments during the past 24 months has strengthened its platform and global reach, offering clients a competitive edge in times of COVID-19 with extreme volatility, peak message rates and exponential network traffic growth. These investments include increased resiliency, capacity, and diversity of its global financial services network, PicoNet. Its real-time and machine intelligence solution Corvil Analytics is now enabled for 100Gb networks to monitor new higher throughput environments. 

Both Pico and Intel will also collaborate to deliver a 100Gbps network data capture and real-time streaming analytics platform for Financial Markets trading. The companies are also in the early-sage development phase around building a financial services lab, where the companies will work alongside top clients to incubate new concepts around AI processing, Machine Learning, Network and Trade Analytics, and Cloud Monitoring.

“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,” added Yuster.

The continued investment is expected to allow Pico to bolster its platform with automation tools for swift and deterministic delivery with accuracy and oversight. Additionally, joining Intel Capital’s list of portfolio companies 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.

“FinTech’s impact on capital markets continues to grow and those who successfully tap technological innovations can transform their competitiveness. 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,” said Andy Fligel, Senior Managing Director, at Intel Capital.