Goldex raises $1M for its marketplace app for ‘ethical’ physical gold trading

Goldex, a trading app that claims to power so-called ‘ethical pricing’ for retail gold investments, says it has now raised over £1M ($1.25M) in a pre-series A round led by a group of angels and institutional investors.

Amongst those participating in the round are Prepaid Financial Services (a European payment card issuer); Gaël de Boissard, former Executive Board Member of Credit Suisse; Richard Balarkas, former President and CEO of Instinets; Nachi Muthu, former global head of IT trading technology at Credit Suisse; Craig James, founder and CEO of Neopay.

Goldex was launched in late July this year. The company was founded by former City electronic trading pioneers from Credit Suisse and UBS, Sylvia Carrasco and Fernando Ripolles wanted to remove barriers to retail gold trading and address some of the questionable practices in the gold investment markets.

The UK app claims to discover the best price amongst all the gold dealers offering bids and offers within the Goldex platform. Sylvia Carrasco, CEO of Goldex, says the funding “has taken us a step closer to becoming the leading gold trading platform that is both ethical and fully transparent to consumers.”

Golden is not alone in the space. Glint is a competitor, but it does not hold any physical gold – whereas Glint does – and Glint sets the price for buying and selling it.

Instead, Goldex routes all clients’ orders to the largest global peer-to-peer gold exchange in five international vaults (London, Zurich, New York, Toronto and Singapore). The company claims this ensures an average savings of 8-12% on the trades and attempts therefore to avoid price manipulation as well as improving transparency over charges.