Finery Markets, a leading multi-dealer electronic marketplace for institutional participants and a trading solutions provider for crypto markets, announced a $5.5-million seed funding round today. The funding round was the first time the company received outside funding.
The round was co-led by G1 Ventures, Gumi Cryptos Capital and Shima Capital. Investors including Communitas Capital, DV Chain, GravityX, Unlimint, Daedalus Angels, oneAlpha, Floating Point Group and other industry leaders also joined the round.
Finery Markets has two business lines:
- A multilateral trading system that connects liquidity providers and institutional clients throughout the full trade cycle. Institutional clients benefit from better execution quality thanks to firm streaming of quotes with a 0% rejection rate, while liquidity providers enjoy protection from toxic flow.
- “Platform as a service” for prime brokers, over-the-counter (OTC) desks and exchanges, offering an enterprise technical infrastructure for risk and position management, financing, trading, reporting and settlement as well as creating proprietary liquidity pools.
Konstantin Shulga, co-founder and CEO of Finery Markets, said:
“Running the first multilateral institutional marketplace in the crypto space, we aim to establish best practices across trading, risk management and operational standards for crypto. We see our role as a foundational building block for maturing market infrastructure, which makes markets more efficient and sustainable. As a marketplace, we focused on bringing in a diverse mix of leading investors that represent Web3 funds, strategic partners and traditional venture capital firms, led by veterans of the electronic trading business.”
“I believe in digital assets becoming a leading asset class globally. Market structure should meet evolving requirements. Our mission is to bridge the gaps in transparency and technological solutions by bringing institutional-grade pre-trade, trade and post-trade infrastructure to a broad range of market participants. We help them to automate operations throughout the whole trade life cycle and increase the profitability of their businesses.”
“Bear markets are great to stay focused and keep building. We launched and bootstrapped our platform during the last bear market cycle and have been gaining traction over the last three years. Now we’re getting our first external funding from well-established funds and financial institutions across the United States, United Kingdom and Asia. We are delighted to welcome our new investors, which have demonstrated confidence in our long-term vision and will help us to expand our market footprint.”
Established in 2019, Finery Markets enables over 70 businesses working with digital assets internationally to get access to deep liquidity pools offered by leading global liquidity providers. The pre-trade and post-trade functionality of the platform provides clients with price intelligence, full trade transparency, settlement flexibility, market and counterparty risks control, reporting tools and on-chain transactions monitoring.
This funding round follows strong growth of the platform with a diversified client base — from payment services processors to institutional sell-side to retail platforms — all of which has been achieved on a lean budget. The platform enjoyed 12x year-over-year revenue growth in 2021 and kept growing in 2022 despite the challenging market conditions.
Finery Markets will use the proceeds of the round to grow its team in the U.S. and Asia–Pacific region, extend its prime brokerage and liquidity provider networks, introduce new pre- and post-trade services, and expand to new asset classes and complimentary business lines.
Commenting on the deal, Rui Zhang, co-founder and managing partner of Gumi Cryptos Capital said:
“As we observed in the TradFi world, a majority of the transactions are actually completed via OTC market, rather than exchanges. We believe it will be the same for the crypto market. As a multi-dealer execution venue, Finery is able to provide a much more efficient trading operation, lower execution cost and safer clearing control for institutional users. We are thrilled to support Finery’s vision.”
Arseny Klekovkin, managing partner of G1 Ventures, added:
“We have been tracking the development of Finery shortly after its inception and can only commend the agility and evolution of the team, as well as impressive validation of the institutionally focused and regulatory compliant business model. The team has placed peer-to-peer and marketplace philosophy at the core of Finery early on, and currently, it is becoming more than ever relevant for any corporate user of digital assets. Recent events and failures of centralized onramps and trading venues underscore the fundamental advantages of Finery and will support its further growth even in the face of challenging markets. Looking forward to working together with Ilya and Konstantin to enable further success of Finery.”
Yida Gao, managing general partner of Shima Capital, said:
“We’ve had the pleasure to learn about the Finery Markets platform over the last year as several of Shima’s existing portfolio companies and partners already use the system. We were thoroughly impressed by not only the tier 1 trade execution platform but also the high integrity and focus of Finery’s team that exemplifies the type of management we love to back in bear markets. Given the recent market volatility and implosions in our space, institutions will trust centralized exchanges less, and this gives Finery — a noncustodial model that does not require institutions to trust any third party with their coins — a sustainable edge.”
About Finery Markets
Finery Markets is a leading over-the-counter, multi-dealer electronic marketplace for institutional participants and a trading solutions provider for crypto markets.
Serving clients since 2019, Finery Markets provides solutions throughout the whole trade lifecycle:
- High-performance execution venue with deep institutional liquidity and firm quotes.
- Price intelligence and pre-trade risk management tools.
- Position management, risk controls, reporting tools and cost analysis, as well as flexible settlement based on a noncustodial model.
- Single entry point to global liquidity providers via API and GUI.
- Robust infrastructure: 99.99+% uptime and full automation.
The Finery Markets platform is available as a white-label solution for prime brokers, OTC desks and exchanges that are willing to develop and expand a low-touch client business. For additional information visit https://finerymarkets.com/.