Boston-based Coin Metrics, a crypto data and intelligence provider, recently announced that it has closed a $35 mln Series C financing led by Acrew Capital and BNY Mellon. Proceeds from the capital raise are intended to be used for new product innovation.
Recent Capital Raise
Institutional crypto data and analytics firm, Coin Metrics, recently announced that it has closed a $35 mln Series C financing round, led by Acrew Capital and BNY Mellon. Other firms involved in the recent financing round include Goldman Sachs, Fidelity Investments, Highland Capital Partners, Avon Ventures and Morningside Technology Ventures. New investors which participated in the latest funding round include Cboe Global Markets, JAM FINTOP Blockchain, Mubadala Investment Company and Brevan Howard Digital.
The new capital raised is expected to be used to fund Coin Metrics’ international expansion and the development of new products, including decentralized finance (DeFi) and other decentralized application metrics.
Founded in 2017, as an open-source project to determine the economic significance of public blockchains, Coin Metrics currently provides network data, market data, indexes and network risk solutions to a wide range of financial institutions involved in the digital asset ecosystem. Coin Metrics now offers a comprehensive suite of services – including on-chain data, a universal block explorer, market data and metrics, indexes and network risk management.
Coin Metrics’ Co-founder and CEO Tim Rice, commented on the recent capital raise, “Coin Metrics serves as a critical nexus for institutions in the digital asset space and has the potential to scale much further. This financing will enable us to accelerate both our business and product roadmap, including through continued investment in new novel risk, DeFi and other Dapp metrics, and in our world-class infrastructure. The quality of our crypto data and intelligence has generated tremendous interest from the growing number of premier financial institutions engaging in cryptoassets, prompting us to expand our customer success and growth efforts globally. We have assembled an experienced team of top crypto, data and financial services experts, and I am proud of the industry-leading work they continue to produce”.
Our Take
Since its founding, Coin Metrics has raised a total of $57.9 mln in four funding rounds, including its Series C raise of $35 mln on April 6, 2022; a $15 mln Series B round closed on May 5, 2021; a $6 mln Series A round closed on March 26, 2020; and, a $1.9 mln seed round closed on February 27, 2019.
As we have written in the past, institutional investors are slowly becoming more interested about investing in the digital asset space. In fact, a growing number of corporations, investment banks, hedge funds, mutual funds, and family offices have all been dipping their toes into the crypto waters in the past few years.
In January of this year Bridgewater, the largest hedge fund in the world, published a report on the growing interest of institutional investors in the crypto market. In this report, Bridgewater estimates that institutional-level players now hold approximately 1 million bitcoin – around 5% of total issued supply and totaling $42 billion at current prices. The authors of this report go on to say, “At a high level, we see institutional investors as still being at the very early stages of developing exposures, but adoption looks likely to pick up in the coming years.”
The view that institutional investors are likely to increase their allocations to crypto related assets, is probably one reason that last month Bridgewater announced it was opening a crypto focused fund, joining other mainstream hedge funds like Brevan Howard Asset Management and Tudor Investment Corp. who have jumped into digital assets.
We suspect that as institution interest in the crypto markets grow, the demand for high quality data, analytics and research-related services covering this space will also expand. Consequently, firms like Coin Metrics are likely to see interest in their product offerings surge in the coming years.