Amberdata, an institutionally focused digital asset data provider, has raised $30 million in its Series B, its CEO Shawn Douglass exclusively told TechCrunch.
The company is now valued at $330 million and has raised a total of $47 million to date, including its seed round worth $2 million and Series A totaling $15 million.
“We decided to do this raise right now because we grew so much in the past year that there’s an unlimited opportunity to go out and be the infrastructure that enables all institutions to onboard digital assets,” Douglass said.
The capital will be used to build new product lines, and although Amberdata has existing deals in the U.S., U.K., Latin America, Singapore and Australia, it wants to expand more globally, Douglass said.
As its name suggests, Amberdata provides data and insights into blockchain networks, crypto exchanges and decentralized finance for some of the largest financial and digital asset institutions, like Citi, Coinbase, Nasdaq and Franklin Templeton, among others.
“If you think about this, digital assets will touch every person and business on the planet and transform finance, and that requires data and insights to be able to embrace that,” Douglass said.
The round was led by Knollwood Investment Advisory and includes investments from Susquehanna International Group, Nasdaq Ventures, NAB Ventures, Chicago Trading Company, Nexo, Coinbase and Innovius. Previous investors that also joined in the round include Citi, Franklin Templeton, Aspenwood Ventures, Rovida Kruptos Assets and Boldstart Ventures.
When Amberdata was launched in 2017, there were a lot of big expectations about institutions and enterprises entering the space at the time, but they didn’t, Douglass said.
“Today, every single bank, every single trading firm on the planet is embracing digital assets, and they know if they don’t they’re going to be irrelevant,” Douglass said. “So there is a tsunami of adoption and we help them by accelerating their time to market and to be intelligent and make data-driven decisions.”
“But what’s most important, right now? What’s happening in the market?”, Eliot Durbin, general partner at Boldstart Ventures and investor in Amberdata’s capital raise, told TechCrunch.
“In the next three years, we’ll see more money in this market than [there has been] managed to date because institutions are stepping up and getting ready to do so right now,” Durbin said.
Although the exact timeline is debatable, Durbin said he believes the top five banks will hold crypto very soon and will need this institutional data to navigate the market.
“Banks are going to get in, big institutions are going to get in and they’re going to need [data] to do their taxes, accounting, treasury management and all the compliance policies they’re building right now,” Durbin said.
There’s a paradigm shift occurring across the market that is fundamentally changing the entire fabric of financial services, Douglass argued. Financial products are being spun out to create transparency and openness, while running 24/7 around the clock to be accessible, he said.
“This has garnered the attention of every bank, every exchange and every financial service business, every insurance company, every regulator, everyone,” Douglass said. “They all need to have data to make important decisions and we provide that comprehensive view across the entire crypto economy.”