New York-based Chainalysis has raised $100 million (R1, 5 billion) and is now valued at over $2 billion (R30 billion).
The blockchain analysis company announced on Friday that this latest round was led by Paradigm, with participation from TIME Ventures, the investment fund for Marc Benioff, and previous investors Addition and Ribbit.
Chainalysis was founded in 2014 as the official investigators into the hack of Mt. Gox, then the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.
“We’ll use the funds to accelerate business growth, expand our product portfolio and continue our mission to build trust in blockchains,” Chainalysis Co-Founder and CEO Michael Gronager and Jonathan Levin, said in the announcement.
“Today’s milestone was made possible by years of hard work by the many early believers who’ve brought cryptocurrency into the mainstream.”
Chainalysis provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 50 countries.
Its data platform powers investigation, compliance, and risk management tools that have been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile cybercriminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely.
If you’ve been skeptical of cryptocurrency, then the first quarter of 2021 likely changed your mind. In just a few months, the price of Bitcoin surpassed $60,000 for the first time. Major corporations including Tesla and Square added it to their balance sheets.
After years on the sidelines, Wall Street began to enter the market with Morgan Stanley offering clients access to Bitcoin funds.
Canada approved cryptocurrency ETFs (exchange-traded funds). Even Christie’s, the auction house founded in 1766, sold a digital art NFT (non-fungible token) for $69 million worth of Ether. But even this is really just the beginning of a decades long modernization of the financial system.
So where does Chainalysis go from here?
“First and foremost, we will continue to provide outstanding support to our amazing customers. We will continue to lead the market for blockchain analysis, investigation, and compliance software with the best data on illicit cryptocurrency activity. Powering the regulatory infrastructure of the industry is the heart of our business and our team works everyday to protect the ecosystem,” Gronager and Levin said.
“Second, We will also expand our product portfolio to provide new data solutions. As a digitally native asset class, cryptocurrency provides the opportunity to analyze assets in entirely new ways.”
The founders said they are building solutions for:
- Cryptocurrency businesses and financial services providers that want to optimize their market development strategies based on on-chain customer behaviors
- Asset managers and financial institutions that want to use on-chain data to discover crypto investing opportunities
- Government agencies that need to connect on-chain activity to other data sets
