Symphony Communication Services

Overview

Symphony Communication Services is a secure messaging and collaboration platform built for financial services firms, founded in 2014 when a consortium of banks led by Goldman Sachs combined Goldman’s internal chat system with an acquired secure-messaging startup (Reuters). The company sells encrypted, compliance-oriented communications — messaging, voice, video and workflow tools — to banks, asset managers and trading firms, and by mid-2019 it reported more than 430,000 licensed users and a $1.4 billion valuation (Reuters). Its unusual ownership structure makes its biggest customers also its investors: the banks that funded Symphony use it for their own internal and external communications (TechCrunch).

This profile covers Symphony Communication Services, the financial-messaging company. It is not the same company as SymphonyAI, the enterprise-AI software group backed by Romesh Wadhwani’s SAIGroup (The Great Entrepreneurs).

A bank consortium’s answer to the Bloomberg terminal

Symphony’s origin is an industry revolt over pricing. Goldman Sachs had built an internal messaging platform called LiveCurrent, in use since 2012, because outfitting its 30,000 employees with Bloomberg terminals — at more than $20,000 per head — just for secure chat was not feasible, a Goldman spokesperson told TechCrunch (TechCrunch). In 2014, Goldman connected LiveCurrent to a consortium of 14 financial firms including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and BlackRock, acquired the secure-messaging startup Perzo for $66 million, and launched Symphony from the combination (TechCrunch). Perzo had been founded by David Gurle, who became Symphony’s founding CEO (Asset Servicing Times).

The “Bloomberg killer” label stuck, though the reality was more nuanced. A widely repeated account held that banks acted after Bloomberg News journalists were caught snooping on terminal usage data; TechCrunch noted that an independent review found reporters had viewed login frequency rather than message content (TechCrunch). Either way, the pricing grievance was real: Symphony charged about $15 per user per month against Bloomberg’s terminal at roughly $24,000 a year, and Bloomberg would not sell its chat function separately (TechCrunch). The company’s edge with banks was compliance — built-in filters and warnings designed to satisfy requirements to retain and scan staff communications, a structural advantage over consumer-born rivals like Slack (The New Economy).

Funding arc and the investor-customer model

Symphony’s funding history reads as a series of bank-led rounds. In 2017 it raised $63 million in a round led by BNP Paribas that valued the company at $1 billion, with Reuters as the original reporter of the valuation (The New Economy). Two years later came the defining round: $165 million from MUFG Innovation Partners and Standard Chartered, lifting the valuation to $1.4 billion and total capital raised past $460 million (Reuters). Backers by then spanned Google, Lakestar, Natixis, Societe Generale, UBS, Merus Capital and BNP Paribas alongside the founding bank consortium (TechCrunch).

What distinguishes the cap table is that the investors are the users. TechCrunch observed that Symphony’s financial backers are all strategic: they deploy the platform internally and use it to communicate with outside partners, integrating market data across their networks in a secure, compliant way (TechCrunch). By mid-2019 the platform had about 425,000 users across some 400 companies, up from 200,000 paying customers at the time of the 2017 raise (TechCrunch). Founder David Gurle told Reuters the company was “reasonably targeting profitability” around 2021 or 2022 and was considering acquisitions in artificial intelligence (Reuters).

Leadership change and the move into voice

In April 2021 Symphony announced that Gurle would step back from day-to-day operations on May 31, remaining on the board, with president and chief commercial officer Brad Levy succeeding him as CEO on June 1, 2021 (Asset Servicing Times). Levy, named chief executive in June 2021, framed his strategy as a “multiverse” of digital and analogue workflows, with Symphony positioned as always-on markets infrastructure (Markets Media).

Weeks into Levy’s tenure, Symphony acquired Cloud9 Technologies, a cloud-based trader-voice communications firm, on June 24, 2021, aiming to become the leading provider of front-office communications technology (The TRADE). The deal combined trader voice with natural-language processing and automation, extending Symphony from chat into the voice workflows of trading desks (Markets Media).

What this profile does not claim

• It does not state Symphony’s current valuation, user count or profitability: the latest independently verified figures are from June 2019, and the company’s 2021-2022 profitability target was a stated goal, not a reported outcome.
• It does not cover leadership changes after 2021, which were not verified from fully-read independent sources.
• It does not assert that Symphony displaced the Bloomberg terminal: sources describe pricing pressure and an alternative, not a displacement.
• Financial details of the Cloud9 acquisition were not disclosed in the sources read.