Singapore App Maker MyHero Raises $10M Series A For Its Stock Market Trading Gamification App, TradeHero

Singapore App Maker MyHero Raises $10M Series A For Its Stock Market Trading Gamification App, TradeHero

NATASHA LOMAS

posted 6 hours ago

An app that lets people play the stock market without the risk of losing any real money has turned its virtual cash game into a pile of actual Benjamins, by closing out a $10 million funding round — one of the largest Series A rounds for a consumer startup in the region, it claims. The app in question, TradeHero, is made by a Singapore-based developer MyHero. Investors in the round are Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers China fund (KPCB China) and IPV Capital.TradeHero users start out with $100,000 in virtual cash to spend, choosing which and how much stock to ‘buy’ — there are no live trades going on here, it’s a simulation — and getting to see whether their trading decisions would have panned out IRL because the app follows actual market movements.

Dinesh Bhatia, CEO and Founder of MyHero Ltd, the holding company for the TradeHero iOS app, describes it a “financial literacy tool” that uses gamification to engage users and help them learn how to improve their trading.

It’s part ‘fantasy football’ style game, part trading learning tool, part stock market tip resource — the latter aspect because TradeHero’s most successful traders become part of a leaderboard that other users can pay to follow so they get the inside track on their (successful) trading decisions (leaderboard members also share in these winnings — giving them an incentive to keep virtually trading on TradeHero’s platform).

Has TradeHero made Bhatia a better trader? I ask because he got the idea for the app after losing “a lot of money on the stock market” by betting on Palm’s webOS rebirth. Oops… “It has,” he says. “If you followed me [on TradeHero] I’m up 50% from January this year when the app launched. The market has been good this year, but still that’s pretty good. But I’m nowhere near the top [of the TradeHero leaderboard].” Ergo, there’s still lots to learn.

Other aspects of TradeHero’s business model include in-app purchase options, to monetise engaged users — by offering them things like the ability to buy more virtual cash so they can increase their liquidity, or the ability to reset their portfolio entirely so they start again afresh. TradeHero also has a b2bc revenue stream via tie-ins with financial companies wanting to reach an engaged community of users — provided whatever they’re trying to get access is relevant to its audience, says  Bhatia.

“Most of our [learn how to play the stock market] rivals do live trading [such as the eToro social network]. We are more about monetising off the information brokerage. In a way we’re focusing on the research — we can call it micro-research — which is user-generated… rather than focusing on the trading. These are tips that you can then use, once you subscribe to TradeHero to actually bridge the gap to live trading, and hopefully make better decisions,” he adds.

So now it’s landed a $10 million Series A, what does MyHero intend to do with the money? Bhatia says it plans to spend the funding on a big marketing push for TradeHero over the next 18 to 24 months. The app launched seven months ago, and has since built up a user base of around 280,000 — three-quarters of whom he says are active on a bi-monthly basis, emphasising that those figures have been achieved working with relatively limited resources.

TradeHero was actually incubated out of TNF Ventures, taking in a seed round of around $500,000-$600,000 about a year ago, with backing from Singapore’s National Research Foundation. Landing such large follow-on funding will allow it to ramp up its marketing efforts on several fronts, he says, including targeting user-acquisition effects at markets such as the U.S. and Europe which it hasn’t really had the “firepower” to focus on to-date. It’s also planning to translate the app into more languages to help grow its reach further.

Markets where TradeHero has been getting traction to-date include Asia and South America, with Bhatia specifically singling out Thailand, Singapore, India, Mexico, Vietnam and also the U.S. as places where it’s garnered a following. “TradeHero is available in more than 200 countries. We’ve been number one in the finance category on the iOS App Store in 75 countries. And top 10 in about 100 countries right now,” he adds.

Part of the new funding will go on ramping up the startup’s headcount, to support its marketing efforts and market growth push. In the latter area, China will be a key focus over the next three to six months. ”We’ve got our sights on China. China has a lot of online accounts, brokerage accounts. The interest is potentially very, very high in something like this,” he says. ”We have tried and tested in markets like Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan where the mindset is very similar. China is a very, very big market for us.”

The Series A round is actually double the amount TradeHero has previously said it was aiming to raise this year. Expect the extra money to go towards a new, presumably complementary app — although Bhatia won’t comment specify on what it’s working on yet.

But fuelled by at least some of that $10 million — and the addition of an Android app to expand TradeHero’s mobile platform reach — this time year he says he’s hoping the app will have amassed a user-base that’s “in the couple of millions”. ”We’ve done close to 300,000 users now with seven staff, with a very limited budget, with just iOS. I’m very confident that we can hopefully be in the two to four million user range,” he adds.

Not just a game: stock market app TradeHero’s secret to standing out is value-added information

By Kaylene Hong, 1 hour ago

In the crowded world of apps right now, standing out among picky consumers is extremely difficult — and it gets even harder when you have a game that is similar to those already on the market. Singapore-based mobile virtual stock market game TradeHero, however, has managed to catch the eye of consumers despite competing with others such as Wall Street Survivor, StockTwits and iTrade.

The app has reached the number one position in the Apple App Store’s finance category in 75 countries since its launch six months ago, and has acquired 250,000 users over 200 countries so far.

And today, MyHero Limited, the company behind TradeHero, announced that it raised $10 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers China fund (KPCB China) and IPV Capital.

What is the secret sauce? Co-founder Dinesh Bhatia says: “Giving consumers the opportunity to learn is one reason why we stand out. The best way to learn is through simulated learning and we have a community to learn from.”

Basically, the TradeHero game has a similar concept to Fantasy Football – you trade on TradeHero’s virtual platform with a $100,000 starting portfolio, and the market moves according to whatever is happening in real life. Users are then ranked on a leaderboard based on a basket of metrics, including how much profit they have raked if the trade had been conducted in reality.

So what, you say. Plenty of games out there have leaderboards.

What makes this unique is that users can basically copy the actions of the leaders in TradeHero and tap into the knowledge they have. Users who want to follow someone on the leaderboard (likely because they want to replicate the trading in real life to rake in some profit) will have to pay a fee, and part of this fee goes to the “leader” user, acting as an incentive to trade seriously on the platform.

Going even further is that since TradeHero replicates the real-life situation, players can then use the knowledge they have gained to conduct similar trades and earn solid cash in the real world. MyHero describes its app as “an engagement platform which encourages knowledge sharing between novice and experienced traders.” Bhatia says:

One aspect is learning and the other aspect is increasing your learning and transferring your learning to real life… it’s looking for a lot more functionality and utility that people can benefit from.

Despite being a virtual stock market game, Bhatia describes TradeHero as essentially being a”financial literacy tool” — in which you are able to gain knowledge via play.

The latest $10 million round of funding will allow MyHero to expand its operations, reach and build out its existing portfolio of product offerings. Bhatia notes that “equity is only the first part of what we have done and we will launch other products.”

MyHero also has much to do to catch up in Asia, as TradeHero is not available on Android yet whereas a large part of Asia uses Android devices. Business development director Gary Gan says the Android app is in the works and will come “very soon”.