Octaura Nabs $46.5M To Give Traders A Way To Trade Loans ‘More Easily’
Octaura, which has developed a syndicated loan platform, has raised $46.5 million in a funding round which included participation from a group of banking heavyweights.
Founding investors Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Moody’s all participated in the New York-based company’s latest financing. New backers include Barclays, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Apollo and Motive Partners, MassMutual Ventures, and Omers Ventures 1.
Octaura was founded in April 2022 by a consortium of banks, including Bank of America and Citi, as an independent company. Their goal was to create the first open market electronic trading platform for syndicated loans and CLOs, or collateralized loan obligations.
The company’s digital platform launched in 2023, allowing traders to buy and sell loans and CLOs “more easily,” something that hadn’t been available to the market before, according to Brian Bejile, CEO of Octaura.
“As a result, participants have better accessibility, less errors and a more streamlined trading process,” he told Crunchbase News. “In addition, Octaura was created to improve the availability and use of data and analytics solutions for the loan and structured credit markets.”
While the company declined to reveal hard revenue figures, Octaura noted that between April 2023 and April 2025, the New York-based company grew its dealer network from three to 25 and expanded its buy-side participation from 34 to 146 firms. Its share of secondary loan trading volume is also up. In the first quarter of 2024, Octaura reached 1% of secondary loan trading volume, compared to one year later when the trading activity on its platform totaled 4.6% of total market volume.
Octaura’s loan and CLO trading platform operates with a transaction-based fee model. Its data and analytics product offerings are subscription-based.
Presently, the company has 60 employees. Octaura currently operates in the U.S. with a view toward expansion into the U.K. and Europe “when appropriate,” Bejile said.
Investor interest
It is not clear how much Octaura has raised in total funding. It received an unknown amount of capital at the time of its founding in 2022.
Omers Ventures partner Laura Lenz told Crunchbase News that her firm has been looking at the alternative asset class space for “a long time.”
“Unlike incumbents or point solutions that digitize narrow parts of the workflow, Octaura is vertically integrated: combining trade execution, analytics and data in a single platform,” she said. “Its ability to deliver end-to-end trading and post-trade capabilities is what sets it apart.”
Also, Lenz argues that Octaura is “not just a tech provider.” Rather, she describes it as a consortium-backed exchange.
“The buy-in from major market participants gives it a structural advantage in adoption and network effects,” she added.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
