Vauld Raises $25M to Help Global Users Build Crypto Wealth
The Singapore-based company, which was previously known as Bank of Hodlers, supports over 30 cryptocurrencies and operates across over 160 countries, with a strong foothold in Europe and India.
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key takeaways
- Over the last year, Vauld’s user base and assets under management have grown more than 200 times, Bathija said.
- “Cryptocurrencies offer individuals a unique opportunity to not only invest in the future but also a new way to build wealth,” he said.
Vauld, a global borrowing and lending platform and exchange, has closed a $25 million Series A financing round led by Peter Theil’s Valar Ventures, the company said in a statement.
Additional investors include Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, CMT Digital, Gumi Cryptos, Robert Leshner, Cadenza Capital, and others. The company said it has raised a cumulative $27 million in capital to date.
The Singapore-based company, which was previously known as Bank of Hodlers, supports over 30 cryptocurrencies and operates across over 160 countries, with a strong foothold in Europe and India, the company’s CEO and co-founder Darshan Bathija told Blockworks in an interview.
The company is also in partnership with exchange and custody partners, Binance and BitGo, to offer its platform.
“We’re seeing tremendous demand to grow crypto wealth,” Bathija said, adding that over the last year, Vauld’s user base and assets under management have grown more than 200 times.
The funding will be used to support the company’s international growth and licensing in addition to expanding its retail crypto banking and investing platform. Additionally, it’ll bring in new talent and plans to have over 200 job openings in the near future, Bathija noted.
More funding for decentralization
In other funding news, Livepeer, a decentralized video transcoding network, raised $20 million to build new Web 3.0 infrastructure.
The company, which is built on the Ethereum blockchain, raised the money in a round led by DCG, with participation from Northzone, Coinbase Ventures, Coinfund, Mike Dudas’ 6th Man Ventures and Animal Ventures. In the past, Livepeer raised $8 million in a Series A round led by Northzone.
“Livepeer’s on-demand platform provides scalable streaming without sacrificing performance or reliability so developers can build live-streaming apps at a fraction of the cost of cloud providers,” co-founder and CEO Doug Petkanics said.
As more content creators seek to enter the video streaming industry, the Livepeer network has seen substantial growth with transcoding over a million minutes per week, with some weeks exceeding 2 million minutes, the company said.
The growth has been driven by a “booming creator economy” and need for infrastructure to manage hundreds of thousands of streamers broadcasting live video concurrently.
The $20 million in funds will be used to scale its teams, expand use cases for the core technology and make the company’s product available across blockchain ecosystems.
“Next level for Livepeer is expanding the video capabilities from live stream transcoding into content delivery services and AI based video tasks, such as automatic scene classification to assist in moderation,” Petkanics said in an email to Blockworks.
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