Crypto Data Firm Kaiko Looks to Asia After $24M Series A

Other investors include German venture capital firm Point Nine and French investor Alven, bringing an international base to Kaiko’s cap table. 

“We are more motivated than ever to continue building data infrastructure that enables interoperability between digital finance and the traditional financial sector,” Kaiko founder and CEO Ambre Soubiran said in a press statement.

Kaiko started out in 2017 to bring crypto data to the market’s biggest players. Soubiran, who previously spent nearly a decade working as a strategist for HSBC, has enlisted CoinShares, Paxos and Messari as clients and S&P Capital IQ, Dow Jones Factiva and Refinitiv as partners.

Anthemis founder and capital markets executive Sean Park will be joining Kaiko’s board as part of the Series A. He voiced his confidence in Kaiko’s ability to pull together “data that is usually scattered.”

The company tries to solve this issue by running Ethereum nodes in order to extract decentralized exchange data directly from the blockchain, for example, connecting trading firms with on-chain insights they can use to make money.

With the new funding, Kaiko plans to address the Asian market. According to Sourbiran, most of Asia’s large crypto data companies are retail-focused and there has only been a strong institutionalization of the space in the last year.

Kaiko is also enlisting Chinese VC fund Hashkey Capital to help establish its Asia business in either Hong Kong or Singapore. 

“One of the reasons [for bringing on Hashkey Capital] would be to have help and support both in terms of advice and work,” and to profit from people “that understand the blockchain space very well,” Soubiran said in an interview with CoinDesk.

Over half of Kaiko’s clientele is based in the United States, 30% in Europe and the rest in Asia and Australia, Soubiran said.