Solidus Labs announced a $20 million round to boost safe crypto markets and financial risk monitoring, starting with digital assets. The funds will be used for a major expansion of its R&D teams in Tel Aviv and London to support a 400% increase in demand for our solutions since the beginning of 2020, as well as extend reach by expanding out sales, BizDev and Reg Affairs teams, and opening offices in Asia and high demand markets.
In addition to Evolution Equity partners, which are leading the round, investors include Hanaco Ventures, which led the seed funding round in early 2019, 645 ventures, crypto exchange FTX and and Avon Ventures, a venture capital fund affiliated with FMR, the parent company of Fidelity Investments.
Angel investors include former CFTC chair Christopher Giancarlo, former SEC commissioner Troy Paredes, former CFTC chief innovation officer Daniel Gorfine, StarCompliance founder Marc Epstein, International Securities Exchange founder David Krell, among others.
“We spent the last three years working with regulators and crypto risk and compliance teams, to understand the challenges they face, and the opportunities crypto provides to create better risk monitoring. The future of financial risk monitoring begins with crypto, and the key to achieving it is in unifying multiple sources of risk data, and processing them faster and more efficiently than ever before, to detect anomalies and build deep risk views of accounts and platforms,” the company wrote in a statement.
Enabling the merits of crypto and digital assets – decentralization, accessibility, transparency and efficiency – while mitigating the new risks they introduce, requires real-time, surgical and effective risk monitoring. It’s not about barring the entry of investors, but rather about the ability to detect and prevent actual malicious activity, and being prepared not just for known forms of fraud and abuse, but also for new forms of crypto-specific threats. This requires crypto-native technology, machine-learning and most importantly, a forward-looking focus on the industry and its needs.