eToro

Yoni Assia grew up in a family where investing was dinner table conversation. His father, David Assia, was the co-founder and CEO of Magic Software; he used to stop the car outside their local bank to point out the end-of-day stock market quotes displayed in the window and discuss them with his son. Yoni received shares as a bar mitzvah gift. After completing IDF military service in a technology intelligence unit and co-founding a video system startup, he returned to building what he had always wanted: a way for ordinary people to access financial markets. In 2007, aged 25, he and his brother Ronen and their colleague David Ring founded eToro in Tel Aviv — originally called RetailFX — in his parents' garage.

eToro's breakthrough innovation was the CopyTrader feature, launched in 2010 via the OpenBook platform. Users could browse the trading histories of other investors and automatically replicate their trades in real time, proportionally allocating capital to mirror their positions. The feature blended finance with social networking: successful traders became influencers with follower counts; beginners could piggyback on expert strategies without understanding the underlying instruments. CopyTrader was fundamentally different from anything that existed in finance — a genuine democratisation of institutional-quality strategy access.

eToro added cryptocurrency trading in 2017, perfectly timed for the historic Bitcoin bull run that year. Crypto trading volumes surged to become a significant share of eToro's revenue, and the platform attracted millions of retail investors who were crypto-native but wanted a regulated, familiar interface. The 2017 crypto rally drove eToro's revenue to record levels and permanently expanded its user base. Yoni Assia's early writing about the need for digital currencies — published in 2012 — had positioned him as a thoughtful voice in the space years before it went mainstream.

eToro had attempted a SPAC merger in 2021 at a $10.4 billion valuation that was cancelled amid market volatility. The company raised $250 million at a $3.5 billion valuation in March 2023 and began preparing for a traditional IPO. Revenue had reached $931 million in 2024 — up from $639 million in 2023 — driven almost entirely by a surge in crypto trading volumes ($12 billion versus $4 billion the prior year). The platform served 40 million registered users in 75+ countries, with 3.81 million funded accounts and $18.5 billion in assets under administration.

eToro completed its IPO on Nasdaq on May 14, 2025, pricing shares at $52 each — above the planned $46-50 range — and opening at $69.69. The company raised approximately $310 million and was valued at $5.64 billion at IPO. Yoni and Ronen Assia remained at the helm — Yoni as CEO, Ronen as Executive Director. The platform that Yoni had built in his parents' garage, because his father used to stop the car to read stock prices in a bank window, was now a publicly traded company on the world's most prestigious stock exchange.