Chainalysis, a New York-based blockchain data platform, announced that it has secured $170M in a Series F funding round at a valuation of $8.6B led by Singapore-based GIC Private Limited. The announcement comes one year after raising $100M in Series E funding at a valuation of $4.2M.
To date, the company has secured $535M in funding from various investors, including Benchmark, Accel, Addition, Dragoneer, Durable Capital Partners, 9Yards Capital, Altimeter, Blackstone, GIC, Pictet, Sequoia Heritage, and SVB Capital.
The Series F funding news was initially reported by The Information.
What does Chainalysis solve?
Cryptocurrencies have already opened up new markets and made the global economy bigger, fairer, and more deeply integrated. However, it needs greater trust and transparency to realize its full potential.
Clear regulations, standard audit practices, and powerful compliance controls for cryptocurrency are the need of the hour to sustain its current growth and integrate into the global financial infrastructure. That’s where Chainalysis comes in.
Trust and transparency
Founded by Jonathan Levin, and Michael Gronager, Chainalysis designs and develops anti-money laundering software for Bitcoin businesses.
The company provides data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 70 countries.
The company’s tools are only as good as the underlying data, and Chainalysis is the only company that has been systematically collecting information that links real-world entities to blockchain transactions since 2013.
A couple of months back, Chainalysis launched two sanctions screening tools – an on-chain oracle and an API. It will provide any cryptocurrency business, protocol, or organization a simple way to quickly check if an address is on a sanctions list before allowing it to connect with their service.
Each will use the same data to confirm whether or not the address is on economic/trade embargo lists, such as those of the US, EU, or UN, with which anyone subject to those jurisdictions is prohibited from dealing. The Chainalysis oracle is a smart contract that can be called from other smart contracts to validate a wallet before allowing interaction with the second contract.
In the past years, Chainalysis has added industry veterans to its leadership team including Chief Product Officer Pratima Arora, who joined from Atlassian where she was Head of Confluence product line; General Counsel Sarah Ward, who was previously General Counsel for SiSense; and Director of Cyber Intelligence Rob Bone, who joined after a 20-year career in the FBI, most recently as Special Agent in Charge Los Angeles where he was appointed by the FBI Director to lead all counter-intelligence and cyber investigations in Southern California.
