Dub, an investing platform founded in 2021, is trying to turn politicians, celebrities, or simply friends into stock trading influencers. The service’s users can monitor investments of anyone who makes details of their investments public and automatically reproduce those trades in their own portfolio.
On Thursday, Dub announced that it has raised $30 million in Series A funding. The round was led by venture capital firms Notable Capital and Neo with additional participation from Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, Peak6 Strategic Capital, and Correlation Ventures. The company’s valuation in this round was not disclosed.
As part of the deal Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank, will provide the company with a $5.5 million venture debt facility, a type of loan that requires repayment.
Dub is best-known for letting users mirror the trades of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, among the wealthiest members of Congress who, along with her husband, has an estimated net worth of $253 million, according to financial data aggregator Quiver Quantitative. Boosted by their investments, the 85-year-old congresswoman has more than doubled her net worth over the past decade.
Because of her demonstrated stock market prowess, an account on Dub tracking Pelosi’s portfolio has 13,124 “copiers”—the number of people signed up to automatically replicate a person’s trades in their own portfolios.
CEO Steven Wang says Dub has gained traction because the app takes advantage of a recent change in how young people invest, shifting from being motivated by calculated decision-making to being driven by trends and online influence.
“It was no longer thinking about budget screens and picking stocks,” he said. “It’s really following ideas and individuals to drive our investing decisions.”
Since launching in March of last year, Dub has been downloaded over 1 millions times and has 50,000 paying subscribers, Wang says
Dub users can create trading portfolios that mirror the trades of politicians and celebrities by pulling data from public filings. However, lawmakers are only required to report their trades weeks after the transaction and therefore, celebrities’ portfolios on Dub aren’t representative of their trades in real-time.
Less famous users can also gain notoriety from their investment skills by making their trading public. Several users have become Dub “influencers,” amassing thousands of copiers due to interest in their own trading habits.
Users can also monitor other users’ trading activity and copy-trade specific portfolios. The company makes money by charging $10 monthly subscription fees or $90 annually, with unlimited trading included. Wang declined to share the company’s annual revenue.
Wang’s company is not the only one that offers so-called copy-trading. EToro, the Israel-based investment platform, lets U.S. users replicate the crypto trades of popular investors and other users with a dedicated feature called eToro Copy Trader.
Dub plans to use the money raised in this round to launch a free version of the app, which will allow users to copy-trade up to two people for free, Wang said. It will also use the money to expand into asset classes beyond equities like crypto and event contracts.
