Messari, a leading data and market intelligence platform for digital assets, announced it raised $21 million in Series A funding led by Point72 Ventures. This sizeable round brings the company’s total funds raised to more than $25 million, supporting an ambitious product roadmap and continued growth.
“We are excited to welcome Point72 Ventures as our lead investor in the Series A round,” said Ryan Selkis, Messari’s Founder and CEO. “This additional capital will enable us to further develop our new suite of financial products and build on the key areas that have been catalysts in our success: analytics, standards & guidelines/regulatory advocacy, crypto education & real-time alerts.”
The investment is a testament to Messari’s mission to make digital assets better understood for investment decisions and public policy advocacy. Ayal Steiner, Partner at Point72 Ventures echoed this by saying: “Messari has established itself as a leader in providing quality financial analytics which provide transparency into the digital assets markets – an essential ingredient for healthy markets. We look forward to partnering with Ryan and his team as they continue their progress in redefining how financial services participants access relevant data about this industry”.
Overview of Messari
Messari is a crypto data and communication technology platform that provides transparency and data-driven insights into cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based assets. Founded in 2018, the company announced Series A funding round of $21 million, led by Point72 Ventures.
Let’s take a closer look at what Messari offers.
What is Messari?
Messari is a financial technology firm that provides data transparency and accuracy in the digital asset sector. The company enables users to monitor, analyze, and access corporate information associated with digital assets such as cryptocurrencies through its data technology. Messari’s suite of products includes an API, natural language processing (NLP) system, data aggregations tools, reporting platform, and more.
The goal of Messari is to provide a comprehensive source of corporate information about digital assets to promote responsible investments and market transparency. This will help users understand the governance dynamics of the space by providing accessible data on companies that have issued tokens or are holders of them. Messari also offers several features designed to help investors make better decisions when investing in these types of assets. These features include real-time access to news developments, an industry-standard taxonomy for filtering tokens (known as “token typology”), smart alerts for materials disclosures from companies in the asset space and direct access to key players within these companies.
Messari leverages blockchain technology and traditional data delivery systems to create their suite of products that enable individuals interested in digital currency trading or acquiring other cryptocurrency-related services to be better informed about the rapidly evolving industry. By leveraging its knowledge base alongside a network of industry leaders it works with regularly—including exchanges, committees such as ISO TC 307 Blockchain & DLT Standardization Working Groups, investors from venture capital firms like Point72 Ventures ,data providers like Cryptocompare and crypto indices like MVIS CryptoCompare–Messari aims to turn cryptocurrency into more mainstream mainstream assets by promoting transparency throughout blockchain networks among all participants big or small. It seeks to achieve this by creating an ecosystem conducive towards fair trade practices through its research tools that enable impartial decision making by allowing users to stay informed in up-to-date truthfully reported market conditions rather than emotionally driven oversimplified narratives or uninformed responses from less experienced participants.
Messari’s mission
Messari is a leading blockchain data and research company that has developed a platform to simplify access to quality information and more transparent. They aim to create the most comprehensive library of real-time, verified digital asset data worldwide while reducing information asymmetry among industry participants.
Leveraging its proprietary datasets, Messari provides powerful analytics tools for blockchain-based investors, researchers, and regulators, allowing users to visualize and surface possible trends.
Messari’s platform helps investors quickly uncover insights about their portfolios such as quantitative analytics on asset pricing movements, qualitative commentary from industry experts, and news about upcoming developments in the space.
In addition, Messari provides regulatory consulting services that help projects identify potential issues with governance processes before projects launch or mature. Finally, Messari’s resources can help enterprises quickly access data from hundreds of market participants across dozens of blockchains, eliminating costly back-end teams needed to manage sources of intelligence today.
Messari Announces $21 Million Series A led by Point72 Ventures
Messari, a blockchain startup and open-source protocol for the crypto industry, announced it has raised $21M in a Series A funding round led by Point72 Ventures. This marks the largest Series A funded round in the crypto infrastructure space.
The announcement comes after Messari announced the opening of its public protocol to the public in January 2020. The funding will be used to continue building the protocol and other key projects.
Overview of the round
On April 9th, 2019 Messari announced a $21 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Point72 Ventures with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Arrington XRP Capital, Distributed Global, BlockTower Capital, Wicklow Capital and Sequoia’s Scout fund.
Messari is an open source library of information on the cryptocurrency markets. It provides comprehensive data on hundreds of assets and is free to the public. This new round of financing will strengthen its data platform and bring more transparency to the crypto market through product launches and partnerships. Messari CEO Ryan Selkis said “This is an incredible lineup of investors for this stage in our company’s development — all successful crypto funds who have known us since our earliest days… We are thrilled to have them join in this next stage of growth for our company”
The Series A marks a major shift for Messari as it pivots from a startup focused on institutional research tools to a data platform aimed at retail investors. CEO Selkis says that Messari was built around the belief that transparency and greater information access are essential to ensure industry growth as it matures over time. He hopes that with his team’s efforts they can help reduce speculation and manipulation by providing transparent pricing information publicly available.
The seed round included participation from Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Notation Capitals Jeff Parks, Cantos CEO Paul Newsome, Tribal VCs Sammy Abdullah & Jake Seid plus five other Silicon Valley-based angel investors raising $3 million.
Point72 Ventures’ investment
Messari Inc. announced today that it has raised a $21 million Series A round of capital, led by Point72 Ventures. Notable first-time Messari investors, including Blockchain Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Dragonfly Capital, Ness Digital Engineering, and more, supported the round.
Point72 Ventures is the venture arm of Point72 Asset Management, a diversified family office and investment firm boasting $17 billion in assets under management and a strong legacy of investment in the financial technology. It invests across stages – from seed through growth equity – using both traditional fund structures as well as separately managed accounts (SMAs).
The funding marks an exciting step for Messari as it gears up to continue growing its suite of products including its real-time tracking & reporting tool for enterprise customers; public data site; and research platform for crypto professionals and institutions. In addition, the company plans to use the funds to bring on additional talent focused on engineering and product development along with bolstering other areas within the organization such as design and sales & marketing.
Other investors
In addition to Point72 Ventures, the round was backed by Distributed Global, a crypto asset fund managed by Arrington XRP Capital; Collaborative Fund; Rising Tide Fund; Refactor Capital; Winklevoss Capital and Blockchain Capital. The round was also supported by seed investors Canaan Partners, FBG Capital, GGV Capital and several angel investors, including Jen Blackwell-Scott of Messari’s Board of Directors.
The fundraise follows Messari’s recent public unveiling of its crypto regulatory compliance marketplace in partnership with regulator-as-a-service provider Trustology. Using Messari’s technology stack, companies can comply with global securities laws and regulators whereas creating a transparent marketplace for consumer holding data. In addition, the platform allows investors to securely share their holding data so that institutions can access permissioned insight into active investments in cryptocurrencies markets.
Messari plans to use the series A funding to advance its regulation technology development, scale its consumer offering, and scale operations across Asia Pacific and higher geographic regions. With new investments and support over the last year alone – 2018 to 2019 – Messari has reached over $50 million in funds raised overall since the company was established in 2018.
How Messari plans to use the funds
Messari, a blockchain data and analytics company, announced it has raised $21 million in a Series A funding round led by Point72 Ventures.
With these funds, Messari plans to invest in key areas such as product development and engineering, growth, data expansion, and global ambitions.
Expansion of Messari’s team
With the funds raised, Messari plans to continue building out its team and expand its product suite, focusing on enhancing the security and usability of token-based financial infrastructure. In addition, Messari is looking to grow their engineering, product and analytics teams by doubling their staff in the next year.
Messari’s suite of products will focus on honing global transparency standards and providing reliable data and digital asset research to investors. Messari also aims to increase adoption of decentralized technologies within the traditional financial system by creating tools such as wallet integrations and institutional-grade analytics that enable a safe entry point for investors.
Furthermore, the funds will be used for investment into key open-source projects that are necessary components of global crypto infrastructure. Messari hopes to bridge traditional financial markets with new crypto-native capital markets with these investments.
Expansion of Messari’s product offerings
Messari announced plans to use the $21 million in Series A funding to expand its product offerings, invest in data discovery capabilities, and hire additional research analysts. The company raised the funds primarily from institutional investors such as Point72 Ventures and organisations such as Franklin Templeton, Digital Currency Group, and Coinbase Ventures.
The funding will help Messari develop new products and services, such as on-chain market intelligence solutions that provide insight into token sales and decentralised finance (DeFi) activities. In a statement, Ryan Selkis (CEO of Messari) said that the company’s goal is to become “the financial data terminal for crypto” and these investments will allow them to do so. He added that proposed products will help improve ecosystem transparency and facilitate a deeper understanding of how crypto networks work.
In addition to developing new tools that offer enhanced insights on crypto networks, Messari also intends to use the newly raised funds to grow its team of analysts who specialise in topics ranging from token economics and open source blockchain technologies, to venture capital investing and policies related to digital assets. This expansion is expected to help Messari capitalize on its growing global user base by providing the most accurate data on digital assets, including token prices, market projections, trading volumes and analysis of DeFi protocols.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Messari Inc. has just announced that it has secured a $21 million Series A led by Point72 Ventures with participation from both existing and new investors. This funding round will accelerate product development and build out Messari’s global markets infrastructure across Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand.
Furthermore, the company plans to expand the data registry, enhance its analytical capabilities around datasets such as derivatives and listings, and scale its developer platform. Messari’s vision for an open financial system has become one step closer to reality with this additional capital.
