Despite the recent huge price drop of a few key cryptocurrencies, investors are increasingly considering Bitcoin as an investable asset as more mainstream capital firms jump into the crypto bandwagon. Amber Group, a Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency trading startup, said on Monday that it had raised $100 million in a pre-funded valuation of-$1 billion in a Series B funding round. The latest valuation is ten times higher than the company’s Series A, which closed in 2019, at $28 million, making Coinbase Ventures one of its investors.
Also notably, Amber’s Series B financing was bankrolled by a list of high-profile financial and VC firms, including China Renaissance, and Tiger Brokers, Tiger Global Management, Arena Holdings, True Air Partners, Sky9 Capital, DCM Ventures, and Gov. Its past investors include Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures and Blockchain.com.
In May, another Hong Kong-based crypto asset manager, Babel Finance, raised $40 million in funds from investors in several large corporations, including Tiger Global, an investor in Amber. Founded by former investment bankers in their mid-twenties, Amber initially began applying machine learning algorithms to quantitative trading, but the team introduced crypto in 2017 after seeing a spike in the amount of virtual currency trading.
The startup now caters to both institutional and individual investors, among other products providing them with algorithmic trading, electronic marketing, high-frequency trading, OTC trading, orron acceptance and nding, derivatives. The company launched its mobile app in the third quarter of 2020, expanding it from institutional clients to retail customers. It is reported that so far the trading app has received more than 100,000 registered users.
According to its co-founder and CEO Michael Weir, Amber has been profitable from the start, with annual revenues of $500 million based on figures from January to April 2021. A. The startup saw record months of client flow and on-exchange market-making volume in the last quarter, and is now “2-3% of total trading volume in the big spot and derivatives market.” Its overall turnover has doubled since the beginning of the year. More than $250 billion to 500 billion. Overall, it manages about 1.5 1.5 billion in business capital which varies based on BTC and ETH prices.
