Blockchain Startup Axoni Raises $18 Million in Series A Funding
Axoni, a New York-based blockchain startup has announced an $18 million Series A financing round led by banking giant Wells Fargo and Euclid Opportunities, the Fintech investment arm of prominent financial services company ICAP.
The funding round was hinted at earlier this week and sees participation from other major banks in Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan. Thomson Reuters, F-Prime Capital Partners along with prolific bitcoin- and blockchain-industry investors Andreessen Horowitz and Digital Currency Group also took part in the funding round.
Like competitor R3, Axoni’s distributed ledger prototypes and solutions have been used for distributed ledger experiments by major financial firms in the industry.
Greg Schvey, CEO of Axoni stated:
We are delighted to have strategic support from global leaders in financial services. The changes already underway based on distributed ledger technology will have a profoundly positive impact on the industry.
Earlier this year, seven Wall Street firms including four global banks successfully tested a blockchain platform for credit default swaps, using Axoni’s technology. The experiment also fulfilled record keeping with Wall Street’s book-keeper, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC).
In October 206, a number of banks and financial firms completed a months-long blockchain test involving equity swaps. Smart contracts were put to use to process over-the-counter equity swaps, achieving a 100% success rate after experimenting with a diverse set of 133 test cases.
“Axoni has developed proprietary Smart Contract technology and has successfully validated this technology in a variety of Capital Markets use cases,” said Thomas Richardson, an executive at Wells Fargo Securities.
The blockchain technology firm also participated in a distributed ledger test alongside R3 this year. Revealed in September 2016, the innovation was put to test in order to determine if reference data processes could be simplified, according to the startup. Axoni Core, the company’s proprietary distributed ledger software helped create the prototype which then simulated the management of reference data among its participants for the issuance of corporate bonds.
With its Series A round, Axoni claims to have raised $20 million in total, to date.
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