Israeli crypto infrastructure and digtal assets security company Fireblocks announced today it has completed a $133 million Series C financing round led by Coatue, Ribbit, and Stripes with strategic investment from The Bank of New York Mellon and Silicon Valley Bank. Also participating in this round were previous investors, including Paradigm, Galaxy Digital, Swisscom Ventures, Tenaya Capital and Cyberstarts Ventures. This brings to $179 million the amount raised by the company.
Fireblocks technology is already used to secure more than $400 billion of assets for the crypto industry and will now be made available to traditional banks and fintechs as they strive to meet digital asset demand. With the new funds, Fireblocks will continue to expand global resources to service the world’s biggest banks and fintechs and connect them to the entire crypto capital markets.
The company is a major competitor of fellow Israeli company Curv, which was acquired by PayPal earlier this month.
Fireblocks was founded in 2018 by three high-tech entrepreneurs: its CEO Michael Shaulov, who in the past founded Lacoon Mobile Security, which was acquired by Check Point five years ago for $100 million; Idan Ofrat, CTO, who co-founded C4 Security, which was acquired by Elbit Systems Ltd. (Nasdaq: ESLT; TASE: ESLT) and VP R&D Pavel Berengoltz, who was VP R&D at Safend, which was acquired by Wave Systems.
The company has 90 employees including 50 in Israel and hopes to more than double its Israeli work force to 120 by the end of 2021.
Shaulov said, "Fintechs and banks require not only a specialized custody and settlement infrastructure to ensure customers funds are safely managed, but a platform that enables new lines of digital offerings. While we have no plans to become a bank, we believe our infrastructure will lend itself perfectly to power an entirely new era of financial services. We are humbled to have the top VCs in Fintech, and the most important strategic partners support our mission to re-platform the financial ecosystem into digital assets. Their financial backing guarantees the long term stability, technology superiority and service delivery to our exponentially growing customer base."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on March 18, 2021
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