Axoni, a distributed ledger tech firm, has scored another big-bank investor in Citigroup.
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The New York startup would not specify the amount Citi has invested in it, but it now sizes its Series A round at more than $20 million. When the round was announced in December, with Wells Fargo and Euclid Opportunities, ICAP’s fintech investment business, as the lead investors, the total was $18 million. Simple math therefore suggests Citi put in more than $2 million.
It is worth noting that the investment is coming from Citi itself, not the company's Citi Ventures fund. Axoni’s other Series A investors include Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Thomson Reuters, Andreessen Horowitz, FinTech Collective, F-Prime Capital Partners and Digital Currency Group.
The banks' backing of Axoni speaks to a larger trend occurring in the nascent blockchain field: the spreading of bets. Banks are joining — and in some cases, leaving — various projects as they try to pick the winners in the still-evolving technology field.
Signage is displayed outside of a Citigroup inc. Citibank branch in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, U.S., on Monday, July 13, 2015. Citigroup Inc. is expected to report second-quarter earnings results on July 16. Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg
Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg
Although Citi is new to the company as an investor, the two companies “have collaborated on a number of successful, high-profile distributed ledger deployments that have validated the technology and its benefits of data synchronization, automation, and auditability to market participants,” Axoni said in a press release Thursday.
Those projects include the optimization of post-trade data management for credit-default and equity swaps and the management of reference data. Citi is also “actively engaged” in Axoni’s work in the replatforming of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.’s trade information warehouse, the startup said.
In January, the DTCC tapped IBM, in partnership with Axoni and R3, to use distributed ledger technology to improve post-trade events in derivatives such as record keeping and payment management.
Robert Barba is the technology editor of American Banker. Robert previously served as deputy editor of American Banker's dealmaking and strategy... Read full bio
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