PrimaryBid

PrimaryBid is a technology platform that allows everyday investors fair & equal access to investing in public companies raising capital.

The story so far

Anand Sambasivan (co-founder and CEO) led the team that conceived and brought PrimaryBid to market. His inspiration for starting PrimaryBid came from his 15-years in finance as an Investment Banker and Hedge Fund investor in New York and London. Here, he was able to get an inside look on why retail investors were being systematically excluded from corporate fundraisings. It was clear that the problem was a global one and a tech-enabled upgrade to process could solve it. PrimaryBid is a technology platform that allows individual investors fair access to public companies raising capital. PrimaryBid ensures that retail investors transact at the same time and at the same price as institutional investors. Through the company's long-term agreement with London Stock Exchange, they have created the infrastructure to seamlessly connect everyday investors with public companies when it matters most. PrimaryBid is a team of specialists with a shared set of principles, working to democratise capital markets and empower individual investors. OMERS Ventures invested in PrimaryBid in 2020.

Themes

Fintech

Founded

2012

OMERS First Investment

2020

Anand Sambasivan

Anand started his career as an investment banker, and became frustrated at the difficultly of including retail investors in company IPOs and advanced placements which was mainly due to a lack of a seamless technical solution. A few years later, together with co-founders James and Kieran, they started PrimaryBid with the mission of democratising capital markets, which in practise meant building a solution so that bankers and issuers could deal with one counterparty as opposed to hundreds of small retail investors. PrimaryBid onboards and builds the digital order book for small investors, and behaves as any other single counterparty for the issues, which means that for the first time companies can include a retail component without hassle. OMERS Ventures had their first meeting with Kieran and Anand in 2019 just as we were getting our first fund set up in London, and witnessed first-hand how the company was building support in the London ecosystem. We first invested in 2020, which lead to a Series B raise of $50M. In 2020, PrimaryBid has acted for over 40 companies, and participated in both the UK’s largest follow-on placement (Compass Group) and its largest IPO (The Hut Group) by equity issuance.