- General
- July 10, 2019
- 4 minutes read
Visa Participates In $40 Million Round For Anchorage
Visa CEO Al Kelly image: Visa Anchorage, a crypto storage startup launched in 2017, has raised $40 million in Series…
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| Visa CEO Al Kelly
image: Visa
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Anchorage, a crypto storage startup launched in 2017, has raised $40 million in Series B funding to accelerate its growth. Blockchain Capital — a VC firm that has backed top crypto companies including BitFury, BitGo, Coinbase, Block.one, Kraken, Ripple, Xapo and more — led the round, with participation from payments giant Visa.
Anchorage says it’ll use the funding to invest in support for more crypto assets, add participative features [for example, stock dividends and bond coupon payments on crypto assets] and work on more crypto services. Including this round, Anchorage has raised nearly $60 million in total funding. The crypto storage startup emerged with $17 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz earlier this year. Khosla Ventures, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Blackrock’s Mark McCombe and AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant also participated in that round.
Anchorage’s founders [Diogo Mónica and Nathan McCauley] had stints at payments company Square and Docker, a leading cloud infrastructure company. They both joined Square in 2011 where they spent four years before leaving to head the security team at Docker. Their payments and security experience make for a good one given Anchorage’s operations is hinged on both. Crypto storage involves a great deal of security given the high amount of recorded crypto hacks [more than $1.3 billion stolen].
“We believe Anchorage is the safest place to hold digital assets, having modernized crypto custody beyond physical cold storage with advanced security engineering,” Blockchain Capital co-founder and Managing Partner P. Bart Stephens said in a statement. “……Anchorage’s next generation custody solution is ideally positioned to help investors keep up with the future direction of crypto networks. We are leading this investment because we believe Anchorage will have a transformative impact on the financial world.” He said.
Blockchain Capital is not just an investor but is also an Anchorage customer.
