A nearly $23 million-large funding round started by SFOX was officially closed yesterday, with a surprising participation of a co-founder of Airbnb.
The ending of a funding round for a crypto startup
Yesterday’s press release announced the ending of a $22.7M Series A funding round organized by a crypto trading platform SFOX. However, just before the end, the funding round received a new participant — Nathan Blecharczyk, known for being a co-founder of Airbnb.
The funding round was led by Arjun Sethi, a co-founder, and partner at Social Capital and Tribe Capital. As mentioned before, the funding round was originally organized by SFOX, a crypto dealer from the United States. However, a lot of other entities also participated in the project, including Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator, Blockchain Capital, Digital Currency Group, as well as Blecharczyk.
According to the press release, the trading platform’s goal is to offer its services to large investors. This includes family offices, various funds, as well as wealthy individuals. Additionally, the platform currently has over $9 billion in transaction volumes.
Sethi also commented by saying that the institutional investors need specific conditions in order to embrace cryptocurrencies. They need to be able to enter trading from a single account, as well as to sell and purchase large amounts of cryptos without changing their prices in the process. Fulfilling these needs is one of the primary duties of SFOX.
The company’s goal is to continue looking into different methods of improving these conditions. They also started the funding round with a goal to add more crypto trading pairs, improve the liquidity, and even to physically expand. So far, the firm has been very successful in developing its services and expanding its business. Additionally, they also reported that their client base grew up to 12 times in 2018.
Other large funding rounds
While this is a major achievement by itself, it is even more incredible when we take into consideration the fact that the bearish market has been damaging the crypto world for eight months now. Additionally, this is not the only platform with such an idea. In fact, earlier in this very week, another blockchain startup called Axoni managed to raise up to $32M in its own funding round. This funding round was led by none other than Goldman Sachs, together with Nyca Partners, JPMorgan. Wells Fargo, Andreessen Horowitz, and Citigroup.
Even before that, back in July of this year, General Electric’s venture capital arm managed to join another big investment round. This one was $12 million large, and it included another blockchain startup, Xage Security. Other participants also included NexStar Partners, as well as City Light Capital.
