Barclays, Citigroup, Goldman Join in Backing IPO Platform CMG

(Bloomberg) -- Capital Markets Gateway, a technology platform that facilitates equity capital market transactions, has raised a new round of financing from top Wall Street banks and investment firms.

CMG said it received a $25 million investment from Barclays Plc, Citigroup Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley, along with Fidelity Investments. Existing investors Canaccord Genuity, Franklin Templeton, StageDotO and Shea Ventures also participated in the round, according to a statement Thursday.

CMG said its platform will connect underwriters, buyside investors and sellers in transactions including initial public offerings. The company, launched in 2017, already supports 100 buy-side firms representing $12 trillion in assets under management and 15 investment banks, according to the statement.

With the coronavirus pandemic forcing most financiers to work remotely, investment banking and capital market processes have gone virtual. Despite a slump in mergers and acquisitions, equity fundraising, including IPOs, follow-on offerings and divestitures, raised more than $125 billion on U.S. exchanges in the second quarter, the busiest level in more than a decade, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

CMG’s platform allows investors to indicate their level of interest in transactions, replacing one-on-one phone calls with bankers and providing a firm-wide record of deal activity.

“The current process for raising financing is very manual, labor intensive and rather risky,” CMG co-founder Greg Ingram said. “We will be the first connected capital market platform in the U.S. capital market.”

Ingram was head of ECM at Robert W. Baird & Co. until 2015, according to his LinkedIn profile. He founded CMG with two other former members of Baird’s ECM team.

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