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Financial Software - Monday, September 17, 2007

NEA & Friends Cough Up $100M For Forex's Oanda

Online forex or currency exchange is a sector that gets little attention, except by users and investors. New Enterprise Associates is cock-sure about forex and together with was joined by Legg Mason, Cascade Investment and T. Rowe Price. they invested $100M in an industry leader Oanda. Currency trading is a $2 trillion a day business (50 times the size of the US equities market), yet there is no eTrade for this market and it is still not common for consumers to trade currencies.

Oanda started life as a simple site for getting exchange rates and it evolved into a site for regular folks to buy and sell currencies and more recently it is going upstream to the banks. In September 2005, Index Ventures made a solo $17M Series A investment in Oanda.

Competition is getting stiff. Last April, NJ-based FX Solutions raised $100M from Francisco Partners in a recapitalization round. In January, San Francisco-based ETF Securities raised a $10M from FTVentures. In July, Technology Crossover Ventures bought a minority stake in bank-owned foreign exchange trading portal FXall for $77.5M. And Gain Capital raised $40M.

Read - CNET