By Kirat Singh and Mark Higgins

Beacon Platform, the award-winning enterprise technology platform that is moving financial markets into the future, is closing out an outstanding year and setting the stage for continued success in 2022. The Beacon team spent 2021 raising human and financial capital, earning new customers and partners, and accruing a range of awards for their people and products. After more than tripling recurring revenue over the past two years, Beacon completed a $56 million Series C funding round led by Warburg Pincus, enhancing our already strong financial foundation. This financing is helping Beacon accelerate its product roadmap, invest for growth in engineering, sales, and company operations, and scale across multiple markets and geographies.

Raising Our Human Capital

During the past year, Beacon has focused on expanding our capabilities for recruiting, developing, and retaining the best people we can. Headcount is up by more than 60 percent, to 155 staff, with more than 150 open positions as we head into the new year. Promotions and new hires are augmenting our capabilities in multiple departments and markets, at our Headquarters in New York and our offices in EMEA and Asia. We have strengthened our leadership team, gaining important experience and guidance with the additions of Aliya Haider as General Counsel, Alla Liberman as Head of Business Strategy, and Micheale Taylor as SVP of Engineering. As we grow, nurturing the company culture is essential, and we actively look for candidates who embody our focus on curiosity, transparency, and problem solving, to produce the best products that we can.

Accruing an Awarding Year

2021 was a very rewarding year for Beacon’s people and products. We were very pleased to congratulate Sarah-Jane McColl, Beacon’s Senior VP of Operations, on winning the Excellence in FinTech award from Markets Media, and to announce that our General Counsel, Aliya Haider, and Chief Revenue Officer, Anya Boutov, were both selected as Inspiring FinTech Females by NYC FinTech Women. On the product side, we were delighted with a range of recognitions of our development efforts, including Innovator of the Year by US Fintech, Best Quant Management Framework in the Chartis STORM50, and Category Leader for ETRM systems by Chartis Research. These and other achievements are helping to broaden awareness of Beacon’s transformational capabilities to new customers and markets.

Earning New Customers and Partners

Beacon’s primary goal is empowering customers to build success by focusing on their differentiated services and significantly reducing the resources required to build and maintain technology stacks. In the past year, we have grown our client base by more than 60 percent and increased annual recurring revenue by more than 100 percent. A wide range of global banks, alternative asset managers, insurance companies, and commodity traders are now benefiting from Beacon’s next-generation platform. 

Some notable customer wins this year include leading global investment manager Blackstone Inc., trusted crypto services provider BlockFI, and independent investment bank Brean Capital. Beacon also extended the scope and scale of our products and services by tripling the number of sales and services partners that are working or integrating with Beacon Platform. Significant new partnerships include integrating with CME Group’s DataMine, advanced pricing and risk management analytics from Decameron Technologies, powerful energy trading and risk management functions with KWA Analytics, and supercharged cloud data capabilities from Snowflake.

Looking Forward

As we close out 2021, we are grateful for such a successful year and excited about the future opportunities. Our exceptional staff and leadership team are continuing to build on their achievements, expanding the benefits of Beacon Platform to new and existing customers, market segments, industry verticals, and geographies.

About Beacon

Beacon Platform moves financial markets into the future with secure and scalable quant technology, elastic cloud infrastructure, and front-office applications. The integrated development environment and a web application framework make developing applications faster and easier. Borne from decades of collective experience developing trading and risk management systems for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs, Beacon Platform gives you the robustness and flexibility of these powerful tools. See how you can increase the return on research and development investments from Beacon’s next-generation platform for enterprise-scale analytics, trading, risk management, and more at www.beacon.io.