Announcing Our Seed Round
Kaiko CEO Ambre Soubiran reflects on what the team has accomplished and what is to come.
Today, with deep gratitude, I am happy to announce that Kaiko has raised a €5 million seed round, led by global financial services investors Anthemis Group and Point Nine Capital. With this new round of financing, we will continue to build and develop the data infrastructure for a new asset class.
Back in 2014, Pascal Gauthier, current CEO at Ledger, founded Kaiko with a single mission: to provide data for crypto markets participants. Kaiko shares its name with the submarine probe that travelled to the deepest point of the Marianna Trenches, bringing to the surface troves of data that influenced research for years. Kaiko was one of the first companies to take on the quest to provide data to crypto investors, with the hope that this would drive efficiency in these newly developed markets.
Fast forward three years and Kaiko 2.0 is born with an expanded mission to provide data infrastructure for all decentralized financial markets. When I took over Kaiko as CEO in 2017, I instantly recognized the powerful effect that data can have on financial markets, having spent nearly 10 years working in the traditional financial industry. Data empowers investors to make informed decisions, which levels information asymmetries and ultimately creates more efficient markets. In 2014, cryptocurrency markets were scattered, inefficient, and lacked transparency. Both Pascal and I understood the powerful effect that data could have to transform these markets into a professional and respected alternative to traditional assets.
Institutional interest now guides our development approach. In the past couple of years, we have designed our products to match the needs of our most professional clients. In the past year, we have:
- Launched a cloud-based Data Feed for the delivery of historical and on-going flat files
- Developed a Market Data API with over a dozen historical and real-time data endpoints
- Built a livestream WebSocket for the provision of low-latency data feeds
- Expanded our coverage to include over 80 cryptocurrency exchanges
- Strengthened our collection of trade data and order books, along with aggregate data such as OHLCV, VWAP, and Exchange Rates
Next to Come
This is only the beginning of our journey to become the top data infrastructure provider for all decentralized and open financial markets.
Early on, we decided not to channel development resources into building a complex price display website or open API services. While we recognize the importance of free data for all market participants, we realized that there is equal value in developing high quality data tools for institutional market participants who have an outsized influence in shaping the future of digital assets. Thus, we made the strategic decision to invest our resources into building data infrastructure to support the needs of professionals.
In the coming year, we plan to further expand our infrastructure into new low latency data products, which we believe is the next step in legitimizing digital assets markets. Specifically, we will be launching a low latency streaming order book product to support the needs of algorithmic traders. We are also developing new data aggregations that investors can use to leverage level II data in trading decisions. Finally, we will be expanding into new data types in the coming months.
To support our plans for growth, we will be investing in hiring top engineering talent and scaling our data infrastructure. We will also be opening a New York office to support regional sales and partnership operations.
Our main objective in the coming year is to provide an expanded suite of data services designed for enterprise-level clients who require both low-latency and high-availability access to clean market data. This is an on-going objective, evolving as markets change and investor’s needs become clearer.
Our Investors
We are delighted to have raised a total of €5 million in seed funding, led by global financial services investors Anthemis Group and Point Nine Capital. Their combined expertise in financial services and technology will help us strengthen our position as the leading data infrastructure provider in the blockchain arena.
In addition, we are grateful to CoinShares, ConsenSys, Olymp Capital, Starchain Capital, and Kima Ventures who joined the round. A number of experienced business angels also joined including: Dominique Reiniche and Christophe Chausson.
The entire Kaiko team is excited for this next chapter in our development and growth. We strive to continually improve our data services and product offerings, so that we can ultimately improve the legitimacy, professionalism, and respectability of digital assets markets.
[We are hiring! View all open positions here]
About Kaiko
Founded in 2014, Kaiko is a market data provider in the blockchain-based digital assets space, providing institutional investors and market participants with enterprise-grade data infrastructure. Kaiko collects, normalizes, stores, and distributes digital assets market data via a livestream WebSocket, REST API, and cloud-based flat-file Data Feed, to which clients connect to build data-driven applications. Kaiko’s raw trade data, order books, and aggregates cover 10,000+ currency pairs across 80+ exchanges, with new markets added every day. With over five years of historical data, Kaiko provides the most extensive digital asset datasets in the industry. Kaiko caters for the market data needs of professional investors, academic researchers, regulators, custodians, index providers, third-party platforms and exchanges. Learn more at www.kaiko.com
About Anthemis
Anthemis cultivates change in financial services by building, growing, and sustaining businesses committed to improving the world. Their deep understanding of markets and models, passion for emerging technology and spirit of collaboration inspires everything they do. By creating fertile ground for entrepreneurs, institutions, researchers, academics, and visionaries to come together, they believe they can solve the financial services world’s most pressing challenges faster, better and for the benefit of all. Learn more at www.anthemis.com
About PointNine Capital
Point Nine Capital is a Berlin-based venture capital firm with a team focused exclusively on early-stage Internet investments in the areas of software (e.g. Zendesk), marketplaces (e.g. Delivery Hero) and increasingly crypto. Their portfolio in the financial services space includes investments in companies like Chainalysis, Bitbond, Revolut or Mambu.
About CoinShares
The CoinShares Group manages nearly $1 billion of assets on behalf of a global investor base, with offices in London, Jersey, and New York. CoinShares provides professional investors with a full range of investment products and services, and has a history of pioneering new approaches to digital asset investing. Most recently, CoinShares launched a new strategy focused on investing in the infrastructure that will enable the digitization and ‘financialization’ of everything. Learn more at coinshares.co.uk
