NAGA adds Exness founder Igor Lychagov as investor in €22.7m fundraiser

NAGA Group has completed its largest equity financing round to date, a 10% capital increase with total proceeds of approximately EUR 22.7 million.

The Germany-headquartered social network for trading, cryptocurrencies, and payments has welcomed Christian Angermayer’s Apeiron Investment Group and Igor Lychagov, founder of Exness as new strategic and long-term investors.

Apeiron has entered into a share purchase agreement to purchase a block of shares from FOSUN Group and is in negotiations to acquire additional shares from other shareholders.

These transactions are subject to regulatory approvals. In total and upon full completion, Apeiron is targeting a stake of approximately 22% in NAGA.

The Supervisory Board will be increased from four to five members and is likely to elect Christian Angermayer for the fifth seat.

Benjamin Bilski, Founder and CEO of NAGA Group, commented: “We are delighted to welcome Apeiron with its Elevat3 strategy as a new strategic partner. We have worked very hard over the last few years and this partnership is an absolute milestone for us.

“Already, NAGA has more than 1 million registered accounts, operates in more than 100 countries and is on track to grow revenue by more than 100% in 2021 compared to 2020. And that’s just the beginning. I believe that NAGA’s growth can be accelerated with the proceeds of the current capital increase and with the strategic input of our new shareholders.”

Christian Angermayer said: “NAGA is one of the fastest growing neo-brokers in the world. The company has impressively proven that combining social media, investments, cryptocurrencies and payments on one platform attracts a new generation of investors who are used to a simple user experience and all services just a tap away. This retail investment market is growing rapidly and offers tremendous potential. I am very much looking forward to working with the founders, the board, Igor and Fosun.”

Alan Liu, global partner of Fosun and board member NAGA said: “We are delighted to be working with Christian, who has a proven track record of building global technology champions. We are also honored to welcome Igor Lychagov to our investor table, his retail brokerage experience is truly second to none.”

After reporting significant growth in 2020, NAGA reported record revenues of $29 million for the first half of 2021, including revenues of $15 million for Q2 of 2021.

This is an increase of 85% over the revenue in the first half of 2020 which was only $15.7 million and the company says that this almost equals the revenue for the entire year of 2020 which was only $30 million.

There has been a significant increase in all their trading numbers with copy trading being the chief among them and have contributed a great deal to the overall revenue.

On a year on year basis, the number of copy trades have shown a jump of over 360% with the total number of copy trades for the first half of this year coming in at 2.8 million and again, this has been greater than the total number of copy trades made over entire 2020.

Traded volume has shown an increase of 160% over the same period last year with the traded volume for H1 of 2021 coming in at over $155 billion.

Naga Pay is an additional product of the company and it hopes that this new product would be able to generate a lot of interest once it’s launched.

Crypto-wallets are also in the pipeline and with crypto and digital payments expected to grow exponentially in the coming months, it should be a big opportunity for the company to build on the growth.