Crypto Data Firm Kaiko Closes $24M Funding Round, Eyes Asia

Kaiko, a Paris-based cryptocurrency market data and research provider, has closed a $24 million Series A funding round led by Anthemis and Underscore VC.

Other investors include German venture capital firm Point Nine and French VC firm Alven.

“We are more motivated than ever to continue building data infrastructure that enables interoperability between digital finance and the traditional financial sector,” Kaiko founder and CEO Ambre Soubiran said in a press statement.

Kaiko, which was founded in 2017, brings crypto data to some of the market’s biggest players, including CoinShares, Paxos and Messari as clients and S&P Capital IQ, Dow Jones Factiva and Refinitiv as partners.

Sean Park, Anthemis’ founder and chief investment officer, will join Kaiko’s board as part of the funding deal. He voiced his confidence in Kaiko’s ability to pull together “data that is usually scattered.”

The company tries to solve that issue by running Ethereum nodes in order to extract decentralized exchange data directly from the blockchain.

With the new funding, Kaiko plans to address the Asian market. According to Sourbiran, most of Asia’s large crypto data companies have focused on retail investors, as data providers have begun to turn to institutional investors only in the past year.

Kaiko is also enlisting Chinese VC fund HashKey Capital to help establish its Asia business in either Hong Kong or Singapore.

“One of the reasons [for bringing on HashKey Capital] would be to have help and support both in terms of advice and work,” and to profit from people who “understand the blockchain space very well,” Soubiran said in an interview with CoinDesk.

More than half of Kaiko’s clients are based in the United States, while 30 percent are in Europe, with the rest in Asia and Australia, Soubiran said.