Goldman Sachs Leads Major Investment in Enterprise Blockchain Startup Axoni
Goldman Sachs and Nyca Partners, have led a funding round raising $32 million for a major investment in enterprise blockchain startup Axoni.
The Series B funding round brought together the biggest names of Wall Street, such as Wells Fargo, J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, and Franklin Templeton, with numerous high-profile blockchain investors, including Digital Currency Group, Andreessen Horowitz, and Y Combinator.
Axoni, founded in 2013, aims to use the funding to complete the transfer of some of the largest financial infrastructures in the world to its Ethereum-based blockchain technology. Greg Schvey, CEO of Axoni said:
“Our strategic partners have been critical to our success so far; we are delighted to strengthen and expand those relationships with this financing as we continue to deploy Axoni’s technology,”
Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citigroup have already successfully tested the company’s blockchain platform ‘Axcore’, for trading equity derivatives.
Axoni is currently engaged in its largest project to date, with the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the highest financial value processor in the world, that processes $1.6 quadrillion in securities transactions per year.
Last year, DTCC announced that it would work with IBM together with blockchain consortium R3, to re-platform its Trade Information Warehouse (TIW) for derivatives processing onto Axion’s Axcore blockchain. According to a DTCC press release:
“The TIW service currently automates the record keeping, lifecycle events, and payment management for more than $11 trillion of cleared and bilateral credit derivatives.”
A massively collaborative project, once complete, the Axcore blockchain will be submitted to Linux Foundation‘s Hyperledger. Chris Childs, CEO of DTCC Deriv/SERV said:
“they have chosen to leverage their collective expertise and collaborate with us on this initiative, which will allow us to build the best solution for the marketplace while minimizing cost to the industry and expediting our speed to market.”
Axoni‘s Co-founders, brothers Greg and Jeff Schvey, plan to expand their team of engineers, and invest the funds to enable existing enterprise clients to “integrate their own users” into three of its other blockchain platforms, also close to completion.
The Schvey brothers also highlighted another Axion development ‘AxLang’, an Ethereum-compatible smart contract scripting language to facilitate formal verification, that it plans to build out.
Last year, Axoni partnered with U.K.-based Clearmatics to demonstrate a derivatives contract using AxLang smart contract language and Clearmatics, ethereum-based, interoperability protocol for connecting multiple blockchains.
C. Thomas Richardson, head of market structure and electronic trading services (MSETS) at Wells Fargo, said:
“We continue to be impressed with Axoni’s ability to facilitate such adoption by identifying use cases that could benefit from blockchain technology.”
Greg Schvey, 31, has built an exceptional reputation, highly regarded by those who have worked with him. Nyca Capital founder and former Visa president, Hans Morris, has complimented Schvey’s management style, Morris said:
“What’s really tough, is getting a large group of these big organizations to agree. And he’s really effective at it,” adding “He’s young enough to be close to the evolving technology, but he also has a rare combination of resilience, prudence and aggressiveness.”
As part of the investment, Axoni’s board of directors has also grown to include Goldman Sachs managing director, Ashwin Gupta, and Wells Fargo’s head of MSETS, C. Thomas Richardson, joining existing members Michael McFadgen of NEX Group and Joe Ratterman, the former CEO of Bats Global Markets, now Cboe.
