London-based Archax, an institutional digital asset platform, announced the closure of its Series A funding round on Tuesday, raising $28.5 million. It will utilize the proceeds to scale up the launch of products and services.
The funding round brought in abrdn as the lead strategic investor. abrdn’s investment in the crypto company as the largest external shareholder was confirmed in August. However, neither of the companies confirmed the amount of the investment.
Other venture capitals, including Bitrock Capital, Blockchain Coinvestors, CE Innovation Capital, Keiretsu Capital, Lingfeng Capital, Mathrix AG, SGH Capital and The Tezos Foundation, also participated in the latest funding round to financially back Archax. Earlier, the company raised at least $8 million in a seed round, as seen on Crunchbase.
“We are extremely pleased to have been able to complete a round of this size during the turbulent crypto and traditional financial market conditions of the last few months,” said Archax’s Co-Founder and CEO, Graham Rodford.
“It is also fantastic to have such credible and strategic partner investors involved in the raise too – led by abrdn. We look forward to the next phase of the Archax journey as we scale up for launch and beyond with these partnerships in place.”
Archax was established in 2018 and became the first company to receive crypto-asset registration from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA ), making it a fully compliant Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP). The company targets institutions with services like crypto custody and trading. Further, the crypto firm revealed that it is working on a range of regulated crypto exchange-traded products (ETPs) but has not furnished any deadline for launching those products.
“The digital assets ecosystem continues to grow at pace, and Archax’s success in this latest funding round underlines the appetite there is among investors to partner with organizations at the forefront of that shift,” said Russel Barlow, the Global Head of Alternatives at abrdn. “As momentum builds, Archax, and abrdn, are well placed to take advantage and meet growing client interest in digital assets that can be accessed through digital exchanges.”
Crytpo Market Turmoil
Archax entered the industry with increasing institutional demand for cryptocurrencies. The growing demand even pushed several established banks to launch crypto services parallel to crypto startups.
However, the retail space is witnessing turmoil this year. A prolonged so-called 'crypto winter', along with some other factors, exposed several crypto companies and forced them into bankruptcy. Recently, Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange, FTX, faced an extreme liquidity crunch, resulting in its acquisition by rival Binance. Both the exchanges signed a non-binding letter of intent for the deal.
