Three years after its inception, crypto financial service provider Babel Finance is racking up fundings and partnerships from major institutional investors. The startup said Monday that it has closed a $40 million Series A round, with lead investors including Zoo Capital, Sequoia Capital China, Dragonfly Capital, Bertelsmann and its Asian fund BAI Capital, and Tiger Global Management.
For years, traditional investors were reluctant to join the cryptocurrency fray. But in 2020, Babel noticed that many institutions and high net worth individuals began to consider crypto assets as an investment class.
Babel, with offices in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Singapore, wanted to capture the window of opportunity and be one of the earliest to help allocate crypto assets in investors’ portfolios. But first, it needed to win investors’ trust. One solution is to have reputable private equity and venture capital firms on its cap table.
“It’s more of a brand boost so we can attract more institutions and build up credibility,” Yulong Liu, Babel’s head of global partnerships, said of the financing which is a strategic round as Babel had “reached profitability” and “wasn’t actively looking for funding.”
To vie for institutional customers and wealthy individuals, Babel plans to spend its fresh proceeds on product development, compliance and talent acquisition, seeking especially banking professionals and lawyers to work on regulatory requirements. It currently has a headcount of 55 employees.
Mainstream investors are jumping into the crypto scene partly because many see bitcoin as a way to hedge against “solvency and credibility risks” amid global economic uncertainties caused by Covid-19, said Liu. “Bitcoin is not something controlled by the government.”
The other trigger, Liu explained, was what shock the industry in February: Elon Musk bought $1.5 billion in bitcoin and declared Tesla would begin accepting the digital token as payments. That sparked a massive rally around bitcoin, sending its price to over $40,000.
Babel’s evolution has been in line with the trajectory of the industry. In its early days, the startup was a “crypto-native” company offering deposit and loan products to crypto miners and traders. These days, it also runs a suite of asset management products and services tailored to enterprise clients around the world. It’s applying for relevant financial licenses in North America and Asia.
As of February, Babel’s crypto lending business had reached an outstanding balance of $2 billion in equivalent cryptocurrency, the firm says. It has served more than 500 institutional clients and sees about $8 billion in direct trading volume each month. 80% of its revenues are currently derived from institutions. The goal is to manage one million bitcoins within four years.