Cake Financial, a social networking site for investing, is raising a $1.5 million addition to its first venture round, with $1.26 million raised so far.
The San Francisco-based company lets users import their portfolio data from multiple brokerages and share their trades with other users. You can follow the investments of other users on the site, especially those whose investments doing particularly well. The site's big selling point is the quality of its top one percent of users, also known as the "elite". Cake's elite have continually outperformed market indices, with a return of 3.5 percent in January, compared to a loss of 8.6 percent for the S&P 500, an 8.8 percent loss for the Dow Jones, and a 4.9 percent loss for the NASDAQ. (Average Cake users lost 7.2 percent.) Eventually, Cake plans to sell data about its top members's habits to institutional investors.
Another bright spot for the site is that the number of trades performed by Cake members has held steady in January, after plummeting last year.
There are plenty of other social investing sites out there, but Cake seems to be holding its own in terms of traffic, with substantial growth over the past year allowing it to overtake competitor Covestor, according to data from Compete, although they're both well behind investment site Zecco.com.
KPG Ventures and Alsop-Louie participated in the new funding, which was first reported by peHUB, citing a regulatory filing. Chief executive Steven Carpenter confirmed the funding and the investors but declined to comment on the valuation or the total amount Cake has raised.