Why get everyone investing?
In some ways, everyone is an investor already.
We invest our most important currency, our time, every day.
We also invest our money every day. Almost everything in modern life is made or provided by companies. And, companies are the primary way wealth is created in the world.
Our goal is to give access to everyone to benefit from that wealth creation. We believe we can make an impact on rising inequality and we can make the world a more equitable place by giving access to markets and educational information.
Why are we different?
We don’t think the investing industry works well for most current and future investors. High commissions and clunky products from traditional stockbrokers can make it complicated for people to start investing. Additionally, business models built on switching investors over to high-risk speculative products can cause general distrust.
That’s why we created Freetrade — to break down barriers and open up stock market investing to everyone, creating a stockbroker you can trust. We have a transparent and simple freemium pricing model, and we’ve built the tech behind our award-winning app from the ground up.
How Freetrade started
Our Founder & CEO Adam Dodds relocated from Canada as a Manager at KPMG and had been investing since he was a teenager.
When he arrived in the UK, he was shocked by the quality of investment platforms here, in terms of cost and usability. They were all archaic and clunky, without good design and had little concern about fees.
They were not built to include even him, a financial services professional.
If you don’t like what’s available, you start to wonder whether you should build it yourself.
Our own brokerage platform
In order to offer commission-free trading and an ever-improving feature set sustainably, we have built our own engineering system called Invest by Freetrade that allows us to execute your trades much cheaper and faster than using third-party solutions.
Owning our tech platform means we are in control of our destiny.
Making money in a fair, transparent way
We have a simple, transparent freemium pricing model where you can pay for the premium features you want. This helps us to build a sustainable business model that aligns with the success of our customers.
We don’t charge commissions on trades, as most traditional stockbrokers do, removing financial barriers to investing.
Freetrade is an independent, privately-owned startup company.
When we started, we decided that raising money through equity crowdfunding was the right fit for our mission to get everyone investing. We are proud to have nearly 13,000 shareholders through crowdfunding, regular people like yourself.
Every full-time team member receives stock options, so we are also owned by our team.
In 2019, venture capital firm Draper Esprit completed a Series A investment in Freetrade. We are proud to have a publicly-traded VC company as our investor.
In March 2021, we raised a $69m Series B investment round led by New York-based growth equity firm, Left Lane Capital.
L Catterton, one of the world’s largest investors in consumer brands, and our existing investor, Draper Esprit, also participated in the oversubscribed round, which contained a secondary opportunity for existing shareholders.
Our people are creating a strong culture
Freetrade brings together people with diverse skills and backgrounds, ranging from leading financial services companies to Big Tech to more. Together we are focused on building an open and transparent stockbroker you can trust.
Openness and transparency is in our DNA and applies to all aspects of our company. We encourage an open and inclusive environment and pride ourselves on being candid, curious, focused, humble and gritty.
Our headquarters are based in London and we’re hiring.
The Freetrade community
Much of Freetrade’s initial company funding came from the crowd, through equity crowdfunding - not billion-pound funds.
Since then we’ve maintained a strong community of our customers for whom and with whom we build Freetrade. You can interact with us and other Freetraders on our community forum or via any of our social media channels.
Is Freetrade available in Europe?
We have started our expansion into our first new markets, Sweden, the Netherlands and Ireland. Our plan is to be available everywhere in the EEA soon.
