Symphony Communication
Symphony is an instant messaging service aimed at financial firms. It supports encryption, group messaging, rich content sharing and third-party plugins. Symphony is developed by Symphony Communication Services. History. The technology was first built as an internal messaging system by Goldman Sachs called Live Current. In October 2014, Goldman Sachs along with 14 other financial institutions created and invested $66M in Symphony Communication Services LLC and acquired Perzo, Inc., a secure communication application that provided end-to-end encryption messaging. Perzo was founded by David Gurle in 2012; he was then Symphony's CEO from  2014 to 2021. He was involved in developing the communication offerings at Skype, Thomson Reuters, and Microsoft. During 2019, it was announced that Symphony 2.0, the platform's newest iteration, would be released to customers in 2020. Symphony introduced new community reach solutions in 2020 for B2B and B2B2C (Connect solutions and low-touch enterprise onboarding), enabling customers to leverage Symphony for their broader omnichannel strategy. Enriched experiences via Client 2.0, Meetings, and broader enterprise controls. Focused on building a developer community innovating on top of the platform. Now in 2021, Symphony is an organization with nearly 500 employees and  collaborators in ten cities around the world. 2020 was an important year for the company as their user community grew to over half a million professionals collaborating and innovating in the Symphony platform. Symphony consolidated its place as a critical markets infrastructure vendor for financial services firms. Symphony is led by Brad Levy, who joined the firm in July 2020 as president and chief commercial officer, and was named chief executive officer in June 2021 after former founder David Gurlé announced he was stepping down from the executive role in May 2021. Levy previously worked at Goldman Sachs and IHS  Markit prior to joining Symphony. Funding. In September, 2014, fifteen financial firms invested in Symphony: Bank of America, BNY Mellon, BlackRock, Citadel, Citi, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Jefferies, JPMorgan, Maverick, Morgan Stanley, Nomura and Wells Fargo. In October, 2015, Symphony announced it had raised $100 million in a new round of funding led by Google, with additional investment from Lakestar, Natixis, Société Générale, UBS Group and venture capitalist Merus Capital. In May 2017, it raised $63 million in additional funding from BNP Paribas as well as its existing investors, bringing the company's total valuation  above $1 billion. In June 2019, Symphony announced a $165 million funding round with a valuation at $1.4 billion. The funding came from Standard Chartered, MUFG Innovation Partners, and other unnamed current and new investors. Symphony has raised $460 million since September 2014. The company's final round of funding was in December 2020. During the series E round the company raised $50 million from current investors. Acquisitions. On November 28, 2014, Symphony Communication Services LLC acquired technology assets developed by Collaboration Services, the open messaging network from Markit Ltd. for an undisclosed amount. On  August 2, 2021, Symphony Communication Services LLC acquired counterparty mapping platform StreetLinx. License. The Symphony Software Foundation has announced it would use the Apache License 2.0 to provide the software as open-source. The contributions will be made available under the foundation's GitHub repository.