An international investment fund based in East Asia has acquired Investing.com for $500 million, sources inform "Globes." The financial markets platform was founded by Israeli entrepreneur Dror Efrat and has over 250 employees, most of them in Tel Aviv, Trend reports with reference to Globes.
Investing.com provides analyses, new bulletins, financial instruments, graphs, quotes and real time data from more than 100 stock exchanges around the world. The platform has sites in more than 20 languages and has over 60 million users.
Investing.com describes itself as the largest global financial site in the world. In addition to stock exchanges, Investing.com also covers commodities, currencies and cryptocurrencies, foreign currencies, bonds, interest rates, options and future contracts, and much more. The company has never raised any money.
Dror Efrat and three others founded the company in 2007. Efrat, who grew up on Kibbutz Urim in southern Israel, served as CEO of Investing.com for its first 11 years of operations. After his IDF service in an elite commando unit, he moved to the US and worked in a trading room in Wall Street where he learned about financial markets. Efrat bought the Investing.com domain for $2.45 million, several years after setting up the company.
Efrat has told "Globes" in the past that when he founded the company, he never believed that it would grow to be so big. "I thought it would be something that could earn $20,000-30,000 per month and that would be nice. I didn't think it would be a full time job but to help in getting it going and then move on to other things."
For the past 18 month, Investing.com's CEO has been Omer Shvili, an Internet entrepreneur who has founded several companies in the sector over the past 20 years. In 2008, he founded Market.com, which was acquired by Playtech plc for €450 million in 2015. He also founded Whitenoise and Investing Media, in partnership with Investing.com.
Investing.com has no paying readers or subscribers and makes all its money from advertising. The company is headquartered in Cyprus with a subsidiary in Israel. After receiving tax incentives in Israel as a tech company, Investing.com moved its management to Israel and expanded its operations here.