Previously

CTO, Grokker
VP/Global Head of Engineering and Product, Paypal
VP & Global Head of Data Technology, Paypal

Company

DriveWealth’s mission is to democratize investing globally and empower anyone in the world with a phone to control their financial future. The company fulfils its mission by working with over 100 partners worldwide who use its technology to provide access to fractional shares of U.S. equities and to the crypto markets to millions of consumers from the palm of their hand.

DriveWealth currently partners with FinTech’s, challenger banks, digital wallets, robo-advisors, and established brands across the globe.

Search Background

In August 2021, DriveWealth announced a $450M Series D with a valuation of $2.85B, co-led by Insight Partners and Accel, with significant participation by Greyhound Capital, Softbank Vision Fund II, and a follow-on investment from Series C lead Point72 Ventures, among others. The funds will be used to execute on the company’s strategic vision of becoming the category leader of embedded investing across digital wallets and brokerage apps on every continent by supporting continued product and service expansion, talent acquisition, and technology innovation to build the most modern, industrial-strength infrastructure in brokerage to support the firm and its customers’ future growth. The funding will also be used to accelerate execution via strategic acquisitions and partnerships.

The current engineering and product organization has built out their robust, core fractional trading infrastructure and is working to develop a cutting-edge crypto trading experience. The company is led by a leadership team of executives whose expertise within equities trading runs decades deep. The sophistication of API interfaces that underlie DriveWealth’s fractional trading platform of services, in addition to the company’s wider product and engineering competencies are at an inflection point that require up-levelling. Initial growth has been driven by more customer engagement, and onboarding among other business processes, are being automated to support frictionless integrations at-scale.

Requirements

DriveWealth knows that it’s doing things right. As continued high demand for the company’s product has confirmed the industry need for its core platform, DriveWealth has been on a course to evolve from being a technology ‘enabled’ platform to becoming technology ‘driven’ in all aspects of the organization.

DriveWealth’s two most critical hires in the evolution of the company were a CTO and CPO, reporting into the founder and CEO, to set the gold standard in refining their product-centric, technology-driven and customer-led culture to become a global technology brand that transcends its sector. They approached Erevena to carry out both searches.

Result

Erevena mapped the leading API led, B2B2C technology companies in the US with these contextual overlaps and put together a very strong slate of candidates for both the Chief Technology Officer role. Harshal rose to the top based on his alignment of values, stage commensurate scaling experience and domain knowledge.

Robert Cortright

CEO & Founder

Having the right people on our team is very important to us and Erevena helped us do just that. They took the time to learn about us, our community and our strategy and identified candidates that aligned to the qualities we need.  I am really excited to have Harshal as a part of our bench and look forward to working with Sam, Maria, and Karla again on future projects.

Marcus Anthony

CEO of DriveDigital, DriveWealth

From the outset, Sam, Maria, and Karla were an integral part of our team. They guided us and were by our side through every step of a flawlessly designed process. They understood the complexities of our business and introduced us to numerous qualified candidates who fitted our exact profile. But more importantly, they were able to identify leaders who shared our vision. We could not be more thrilled to welcome Harshal to the team. Sam is now a trusted partner of our company, and we look forward to his continued advice and guidance as we continue to grow.

Our expert

Maria Josife, Partner

Specialisms: Board, CEO, COO, Commercial Leadership

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