French crypto market data startup Kaiko raises €20.1M, eyes North American and Asian markets

Paris-based Kaiko, a digital assets data provider that covers top cryptocurrency exchanges, announced that it has raised $24M (approx €20.1M) in its Series A round of funding. 

This round of funding also coincides with the launch of Kaiko Stream, a data service designed to connect institutional market participants with crypto data feeds that match the infrastructural robustness of traditional financial data products.

Investors in this round

The round was led by global financial services investors Anthemis and Underscore VC. With this development, Sean Park, Anthemis founder, and Underscore VC’s founder and experienced market data infrastructure investor, Richard Dulude will be joining Kaiko’s board. Point Nine, Alven, and Hashkey Capital also invested in the round.

Speaking on the development, Sean Park, Anthemis founder, says, “Anthemis is excited to be a lead investor in Kaiko for a second time. We believe that Kaiko is providing invaluable information on the depth and structure of the market – data that is usually scattered, and even when publicly accessible, is technically challenging, time consuming and costly to meaningfully ingest. For any capital markets transformation to take place, reliable and machine-readable data is necessary.”

How will the funds be utilised?

The proceeds from this round will accelerate the development of Kaiko’s professional data products and help the company’s expansion into North American and Asian markets.

Prior to this raise, Kaiko assembled a team of financial services veterans from Euronext, HSBC, and Silicon Valley Bank to support their mission. And with this new round of funding, the company says it will continue hiring in the areas of product, institutional sales, business development, and engineering. 

Besides, Kaiko will also expand its on-chain capabilities and coverage of DeFi protocols.

The rationale behind the name

Kaiko was founded in 2014 by Ambre Soubiran and Pascal Gauthier and was originally called Challenger Deep. 

Challenger Deep is the deepest known point on earth, located in the Mariana Trenches. It is one of the most unexplored places on Earth. Kaiko is the name of the expedition down Challenger Deep and the one which brought the most useful data to the surface.

In this regard, Kaiko collects, normalises and distributes cryptocurrency, and provides raw and aggregated data that is needed to gain a competitive advantage in the market. The company’s mission is to be the foundation of the digital finance economy by serving as a single source for financial market information. The company believes that its data infrastructure and the position at the crossroads of traditional and digital finance will further drive institutional adoption throughout this next stage of growth.

According to the company’s statement, currently, Kaiko’s trade and order book data feeds are comprehensive, reliable and granular in the industry. And the company’s services are leveraged by firms including CoinShares, Messari, Paxos, Ledger, and Compass Financial Technologies. In addition, the company also partners with traditional financial platforms S&P Capital IQ, Dow Jones Factiva, Refinitiv, and Factset to distribute original research and data.

Kaiko’s Founder and CEO Ambre Soubiran, says, “The immense interest we have received from institutional investors over the past year has bolstered our core mission, and we are more motivated than ever to continue building data infrastructure that enables interoperability between digital finance and the traditional financial sector.”

The company has a team with expertise in finance, data science, and distributed systems to optimise work.

Underscore VC’s founder, Richard Dulude, adds, “We are seeing the worlds of traditional and digital finance further blend together, and many traditional assets, such as stocks, bonds, real estate, and more will begin to settle onto blockchains. As these assets migrate from traditional to digital infrastructure on blockchains, we believe these new markets will trade around the clock on a global basis. Kaiko will sit in an increasingly important and strategic position in the market as the leading data provider for the digital assets ecosystem.”