Kaiko, the leading cryptocurrency market data provider, announced today a $24 million Series A funding round led by global financial services investors Anthemis and Underscore VC. Point Nine, Alven and Hashkey Capital also joined the round, bringing to the table an international investor base with a strong background in fintech, financial services, software and crypto.
Kaiko’s mission is to be the foundation of the digital finance economy by serving as a single source for consolidated financial market information. Kaiko’s high-quality data infrastructure and unique position at the crossroads of traditional and digital finance will further drive institutional adoption throughout this next stage of growth.
Sean Park, Anthemis founder and experienced capital markets executive, will be joining Kaiko’s board. “Anthemis is excited to be a lead investor in Kaiko for a second time. We believe that Kaiko is providing invaluable information on the depth and structure of the market––data that is usually scattered, and even when publicly accessible, is technically challenging, time consuming and costly to meaningfully ingest. For any capital markets transformation to take place, reliable and machine-readable data is necessary.”
This new round of funding will accelerate the development of Kaiko’s professional data products and support the company’s expansion into North American and Asian markets, addressing leading financial institutions and blockchain market participants. The latest round also coincides with the launch of Kaiko Stream, a first-of-its-kind data service designed to connect institutional market participants with consolidated crypto data feeds that match the infrastructural robustness of traditional financial data products.
Since the company’s founding, Kaiko has recognized the critical importance of data quality and transparency in driving market efficiency.
Today, their trade and order book data feeds are the most comprehensive, reliable and granular in the industry, leveraged by leading firms including CoinShares, Messari, Paxos, Ledger, and Compass Financial Technologies. Kaiko also partners with traditional financial platforms S&P Capital IQ, Dow Jones Factiva, Refinitiv, and Factset to distribute original research and data.
“The immense interest we have received from institutional investors over the past year has bolstered our core mission and we are more motivated than ever to continue building data infrastructure that enables interoperability between digital finance and the traditional financial sector,” said Kaiko’s Founder and CEO Ambre Soubiran.
Prior to this raise, Kaiko assembled an outstanding team of financial services veterans from Euronext, HSBC, and Silicon Valley Bank to support their mission. With this new round of funding, the company will continue hiring in the areas of product, institutional sales, business development, and engineering. Kaiko will also expand their on-chain capabilities and coverage of DeFi protocols ensuring they continuously support the increasingly decentralized financial industry.
Underscore VC’s founder and experienced market data infrastructure investor, Richard Dulude, will also be joining the board. “We are seeing the worlds of traditional and digital finance further blend together and many traditional assets, such as stocks, bonds, real estate, and more will begin to settle onto blockchains,” said Dulude. “As these assets migrate from traditional to digital infrastructure on blockchains, we believe these new markets will trade around the clock on a global basis. Kaiko will sit in an increasingly important and strategic position in the market as the leading data provider for the digital assets ecosystem.”
Why we invested?
“As it started collecting and organizing data way before the institutional appetite for cryptoassets, kicked in, Kaiko has built the most extensive digital assets market data history, elegantly turned into a simple API usable by institutional investors. The unstoppable energy of Ambre, Kaiko’s CEO with both a financial markets background and crypto experience convinced us to embark on this journey and help institutions make better-informed decisions when it comes to digital assets.” said Bartosz Jakubowski, Principal at Alven.