About DriveWealth
DriveWealth was founded in 2012 by Robert Cortright, building brokerage infrastructure aimed at giving other companies, rather than individual retail consumers directly, the ability to offer investing and trading features embedded within their own apps and platforms, an early example of the "embedded finance" model that has since become common across the fintech industry. DriveWealth holds the necessary regulatory licenses and clearing and custody infrastructure to operate as a U.S. broker-dealer, and exposes trading, account management, and market data functionality through a developer-friendly API that other businesses, ranging from domestic fintech apps to international platforms seeking to offer U.S. equities trading to customers outside the United States, can integrate into their own branded products using DriveWealth’s brokerage infrastructure, subject to applicable regulatory requirements.
The company's brokerage-as-a-service model has made it a common backend infrastructure provider for a range of consumer fintech apps, robo-advisors, and, notably, a significant number of international platforms in markets such as Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere that want to offer their local customers access to U.S. stock markets, a segment where DriveWealth's ability to handle the cross-border regulatory and operational complexity of U.S. securities trading has been a particularly important value proposition, since building this capability independently would require significant regulatory expertise and infrastructure investment for each individual international fintech company. DriveWealth's technology supports features such as fractional share trading, which lets users invest a specific dollar amount in a stock rather than needing to purchase whole shares, a capability that has been particularly important for reaching younger and lower-balance investors globally who may not have enough capital to buy a full share of higher-priced stocks. The company has raised substantial venture funding from investors including Softbank Vision Fund and Point72 Ventures, reaching unicorn status, competing with other embedded brokerage infrastructure providers including Alpaca and Apex Fintech Solutions.
