London-based Nayms, a smart contract platform for the placement, trade, reporting, and settlement of insurance risk, announced on Thursday, April 20, that it has closed its private token sale.
Though the investment amount was undisclosed, Nayms says it has raised this capital at an $80M (approximately €72.99M) valuation. With this, the company has now raised a total of $12M in funding.
Investors in this round
The round was led by UDHC, a DeFi investor led by the former leadership team of the Maker Foundation, which designed and deployed the MakerDAO protocol. By supporting and guiding projects on known DeFi protocols, UDHC hopes to push DeFi into the mainstream.
Investors in the latest round also include New Form, Tokentus, and Keyrock.
UDHC CEO Steven Becker says, “As a fully-regulated marketplace for on-chain insurance, Nayms represents the next major step in risk transfer. Using blockchain technology, Nayms extends traditional risk markets using decentralised tools and features that take risk pricing and management to a new level.”
“Bringing on-chain capability to traditional markets creating a new, efficient, and transparent financial future is the primary focus of UDHC, and we believe the team at Nayms has the potential to shape that future.”
A fully-regulated marketplace for on-chain insurance
Founded in 2019 by Dan Roberts and Theodore Georgas, Nayms is on a mission to modernise the insurance sector by creating the world’s best digital insurance marketplace for transparent, traceable, and transferable digital asset risk.
Nayms claims it was the first in the space to possess both the full Digital Asset Business Act licence and the Bermuda Innovative Insurer General Business licence, allowing its insurance partners to conduct regulated insurance business on-chain for the first time.
The startup is nearing completion before releasing a variety of insurance programmes with companies such as Aon, Breach, and Evertas.
With the raised capital, Nayms believes it’s possible to accelerate the engineering efforts for continuous upgrades post-launch as onboarding continues for the first users of the marketplace.
Capital utilisation
Nayms claims it will use the money to grow its global staff and accelerate the development of its crypto-native insurance marketplace. It intends to expand to support future product development, marketing, and worldwide commercial expansion.
The new funds will also help Nayms to continue developing an end-to-end marketplace that connects brokers, insurers, sponsors, and capital sources.
Dan Roberts says, “It is very exciting for us to work more deeply with one of our very first investors and board members. The real experience that the UDHC team has continues to drive us forward as we navigate building and launching our proposition to the market. This round of funding has set us up for an extremely strong 2023, with all the right players behind us.”
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