UAE’s fintech Firm Epic Markets raises $10M in Pre-Seed funding
The UAE-based brokerage platform Epic Markets has raised a $10 million pre-seed funding round led by Karatage. The funding will be used to accelerate the development of the fintech platform and strengthen its technology offering before the platform rolls out into the market.
Why it matters: Epic Markets aims to bridge the gap in trading experience that is available to institutional clients versus retail investors. The startup is thus building a multi-asset brokerage platform that gives these retail investors an institutional-grade trading capability.
The details: The startup was founded by Kevin Kimmel and Brian Seegers in 2026. The company stated in a press release on Wamda that the platform aims to bring a change in trade execution with integrated multi-asset functionality. Kimmel has spent more than 10 years as Global Head of eFX at Citadel Securities before leaving the firm in 2025, with earlier senior roles at JP Morgan, YellowJacket, which was acquired by ICE, and Tradeweb.
Seegers, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer, served as Director of FX Business Development at Citadel Securities from 2019 to 2025, and was previously Senior Vice President of eFX at Jefferies, where he was responsible for global eFX trading, algorithmic execution and liquidity management.
The company was established in 2026 and plans to operate across both the United States and the UAE, with regulatory disclosures on its website indicating it intends to offer contracts for difference. No regulatory licences have been announced publicly to date, and the venture remains largely undisclosed beyond its funding.
The investor: Karatage is a London-based firm investing across artificial intelligence, decentralised finance and crypto-infrastructure networks, and the round establishes it as Epic Markets' first institutional backer. The firm recently appointed IMC Trading veteran Shane O'Callaghan as a senior partner, giving it market-structure expertise directly relevant to an execution-led brokerage bet. The founders named Marius Barnett and O'Callaghan in thanking the Karatage team for the partnership.
The wider read: Retail participation in global markets has expanded considerably since 2020, and competition among brokerages has moved away from zero-commission pricing towards execution quality, latency and breadth of asset coverage, which are the areas where institutional infrastructure holds an advantage. For the UAE, a venture of this profile choosing the Emirates as one of two launch markets reflects the depth Dubai and Abu Dhabi have built in capital markets infrastructure and the credibility of their regulatory regimes with senior Wall Street operators. The commercial question that remains open is whether the pedigree converts into distribution, because execution quality is difficult to market to a retail audience that has been trained to compare fees.
