Blockchain Provider Axoni Raises US$32M From Goldman Sachs, Nacy Partners

Axoni, a provider of enterprise blockchain technology, has raised US$32 million in a Series B funding round led by Goldman Sachs and Nyca Partners. The round included participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Citi, Coatue Management, Digital Currency Group, F-Prime Capital, Franklin Templeton Investments, J.P. Morgan, NEX Group, Wells Fargo, and Y Combinator. It brings Axoni’s total funding raised to data to more than US$55 million, the startup said on Tuesday.

“Axoni has established itself as a market leader in enterprise blockchain, delivering solutions that can be used at scale across financial markets,” said Ashwin Gupta, managing director of Goldman Sachs.

C. Thomas Richardson, head of market structure and electronic trading services at Wells Fargo Securities, said that adoption of distributed ledger protocols in capital markets resembled the early days of adopting TCP/IP for distributed enterprise applications.

“We continue to be impressed with Axoni’s ability to facilitate such adoption by identifying use cases that could benefit from blockchain technology,” Richardson said.

Wells Fargo co-led Axoni’s Series A funding round back in December 2016.

Axonis, which offers blockchain infrastructure, distributed application development, and workflow automation tools, said it will use the investment to complete work on projects such as the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation’s effort to move its US$11 trillion Trade Information Warehouse to a blockchain-based infrastructure, and help existing clients integrate their own users into three platforms nearing completion.

The funds will also be used to make new hires, especially in its engineering team, enhance its data synchronization technology, expand its suite of infrastructure products to support deployments of AxCore, and advance development of AxLang.

AxCore is the base layer of Axoni’s distributed ledger infrastructure that serves as the underlying framework to share and synchronize data between systems and institutions while maintaining the privacy, scalability, and auditability required for capital markets. Meanwhile, AxLang is a new smart contract programming language based on Scala that supports functional programming and enables formal verification of smart contracts for Ethereum-compatible networks.

Axoni has partnered with and served several top investment banks, asset managers, and market infrastructure companies with its AxCore technology having been deployed across a variety of markets ranging from complex derivatives to high-volume foreign exchange.

Founded in 2013 and based in New York, Schvey, Inc. is the company behind Axoni and TradeBlock, a provider of institutional trading tools for cryptocurrencies and crypto-assets.