Chicago’s Vinyl Equity raises $20M Series A led by Jump Capital

Vinyl Equity, a Chicago-based financial technology company and SEC-registered transfer agent, announced this week it had raised a $20 million Series A led by Jump Capital.

MUFG Innovation Partners - the corporate venture arm of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group - joined the round as a strategic investor, alongside continued backing from existing investors Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Infinity Ventures, and Cambrian Fintech.

Vinyl builds infrastructure for capital markets and corporate transactions, handling work such as shareholder recordkeeping, equity operations, paying agency, and transaction workflows for private and public companies. As an SEC-registered transfer agent, it supports companies through IPOs, mergers and acquisitions, equity plan administration, and ongoing issuer operations.

Vinyl was founded by Rob Schoder, who serves as CEO and Poornaprajna Udupi, serves as CTO. Schoder said in the announcement that the systems issuers use to operate in the capital markets “were built for a different era, and the workarounds that held things together no longer scale.”

The company points to its work with Neptune Insurance Holdings Inc. as an example. Vinyl served as transfer agent for Neptune following the insurer’s listing on the New York Stock Exchange, managing shareholder onboarding, recordkeeping, and transaction processing. Jim Steiner, Neptune’s chief operating and chief financial officer, said the company needed a partner that “could handle complexity without introducing operational risk” as it entered the public markets.

Vinyl is also building integrations with equity plan administrators, connecting transfer agency and plan administration through APIs so that vested and exercised shares are reconciled in real time - a process the company says has historically relied on manual data entry and settlement delays.

Yelena Shkolnik, a partner at Jump Capital, tied the investment to the prospect of tokenized securities. She said core capital markets infrastructure has changed little in decades and that the tokenization of securities is “an active development that most of the existing infrastructure is unprepared for.”

The company said it will use the funding to expand its engineering, compliance, and go-to-market teams and to deepen support for issuers in private and public markets.