Haruko, a London fintech has closed $10 million in a seed funding round. The financing round was led by Portage Ventures and White Star Capital. With the proceeds of this round, Haruko will build a one-stop shop for institutional crypto investors.
Connects capital and blockchain
Haruko powers institutional access to digital assets globally. It was founded by Shamyl Malik, Omer Suleman, and Adam Carlile with prior experience in both traditional and digital asset markets. The company intends to be the go-to interface between institutions and the fast moving world of blockchain. It does this by leveraging its trading and technical experience to build a comprehensive gateway to blockchain opportunities.
The company has a growing list of clients that rely on the platform for its ease of use and connectivity across CeFi exchanges and DeFi protocols, accurate valuations, vast data sources and high performance analytical tools that enable effective digital assets portfolio management.
“Over the last year, Haruko has come a long way,” said Shamyl Malik, CEO of Haruko. “We have successfully brought our platform to market, providing the technology layer that brings institutional capital to the digital-assets ecosystem. We are grateful to our team of incredibly hard-working and dedicated engineers and to our strategic partners for their immense support.”
Funds utilisation
Haruko is becoming a one-stop shop for institutional crypto investors. Already, several institutional clients ranging from hedge funds and crypto-native banks to credit intermediaries and fund administrators are using the product to easily capture a granular set of risk metrics and get real-time pricing and analytics. The institutional-grade services seamlessly integrate with client systems to put crypto investing right alongside more established asset classes.
Stephanie Choo, Partner at Portage Ventures, the lead investor in Haruko’s raise, said, “Many current solutions require a level of trust that institutions can’t afford to give. We believe Haruko has successfully combined financial and technology expertise to engineer institutional-grade services that put crypto trading on par with other asset classes. We conducted extensive research for a portfolio management system alongside several crypto-hedge funds and found Haruko to be the best product for CeFi and DeFi valuations in one fully integrated platform.”
“Haruko’s founders are traders and technologists with deep expertise in traditional and crypto markets,” said Sep Alavi, General Partner at White Star Capital. “Having dealt with exchanges and protocols deploying institutional capital, the team is acutely aware of the pain points and the opportunity to eliminate them through the Haruko platform. We look forward to supporting the team as they bring transparency and accuracy to the crypto capital markets and make it accessible to more investors.”
What does Haruko do?
The crypto ecosystem is the breeding ground for game-changing innovation. While institutional capital is increasingly convinced of the opportunity, unfamiliar and unreliable technology remains a major barrier to its entry.
The London startup is bridging this gap with a platform that provides both a sophisticated but easy to use API and a convenient dashboard enabling institutional investors to easily interact with crypto markets.
Haruko intends to provide crypto participants reliable data on pricing and tools and accurately value diverse portfolios across protocols. The platform unifies and normalises the technology lift for institutions, it also uncomplicates the interaction with this ecosystem making yield generation easily accessible.
It provides clients access to real-time and historical portfolio valuations, deep protocol level insights, activity monitoring and blockchain transaction automation. By combining these elements with a robust security framework, Haruko removes risk and common pain points for institutions entering the digital assets space.