DASH Technology Group has secured a $20 million investment from Bailador Technology Investments in its latest round of funding.
DASH chief executive Andrew Whelan says that in a space still dominated by institutional players this gives the business the capital it needs to from “innovative competitor to genuine challenger”.
“We’re now incredibly well funded and that gives a lot of confidence to advisers who were early adopters,” Whelan tells Professional Planner.
DASH will increase its headcount by 20, focusing on supporting its technology, sales, client transitions, and software teams.
Whelan says the technology landscape has changed permanently from here and DASH isn’t going anywhere.
“This is a real gamechanger for the industry,” Whelan says. “You can talk confidently about HUB [24] and Netwealth and Dash in the same sentence now.”
Bailador is an ASX-listed “expansion-stage” technology investor.
“[We] invest in technology businesses that are private and have an exciting growth runway ahead of them,” Bailador partner James Johnstone says.
“We’ve got to know the team over the past six months or so and I’ve been very impressed with the team and their pedigree and what they’ve done historically, but more importantly what they’re intending to do in terms of rolling out an innovative platform to the financial planning space.”
Bailador aims to invest in businesses with more than $5 million in revenue.
“Being a software investor, what you look for is businesses with that have recurring revenue streams with high degrees of forecast ability to have massive markets to address,” Johnstone says.
This is the first investment in the financial advice sector for Bailador and the first “to a certain an extent” in fintech, with the next closest investment being mortgage aggregation platform Lendi.
Johnstone says the firm’s most notable investment is ASX-listed hotel commerce platform SiteMinder which now has a $1.5 billion market cap.
“We invested in that business in 2011 when it was a private business and have seen it through growing from a small business into that that is doing circa $180 million of run rate revenue,” Johnstone says.
Johnstone, along with Bailador partner David Kirk, will join the board as part of the investment.
On 22 March 23, DASH competed another capital raise which led to a $10 million injection from CoAct, which led to it hiring 10 further staff members.
