Ex-Wall Street Execs Secure Funding for Young Crypto Firm

Former Morgan Stanley pros look to build tools to help bring trillions of dollars in institutional funds to the blockchain

article-image

Cloudwall Capital’s Singapore team, including co-founder Jia Yng Wee (third from left) | Source: Cloudwall Capital

share

key takeaways

  • Cloudwall Capital seeks to become “the critical arbiter of risk and insight for institutional investors”
  • Firm to use capital from $6.3 million fundraise to build digital asset portfolio management platform designed for institutions

A crypto risk management startup founded by former Morgan Stanley executives is looking to help institutions enter the crypto space fresh off its seed funding round. 

Founded last year by Kyle Downey, Jia Yng Wee and Ilya Kulyatin, Cloudwall Capital hopes to bridge the traditional finance world with digital assets and decentralized finance through its Serenity offering. 

Downey, who is Cloudwall’s CEO, previously served as the global head of automated risk trading and quantitative investment strategies IT at Morgan Stanley, where he worked for 17 years. He had worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs earlier in his career.

Cloudwall Capital’s New York team, including co-founders Kyle Downey and Ilya Kulyatin (second and third from left)

Studying and trading crypto since 2013, Downey said crypto was his “side passion” to his work on Wall Street for nearly a decade.

“I’ve always believed that digital assets would eventually become incorporated into the traditional financial system and be adopted by institutional investors,” he told Blockworks. “After the ‘summer of DeFi’ in 2020, the process accelerated, and as we emerged from the pandemic in 2021, I realized I had to move.”

Wee was most recently the head of business management at Tokyo-based financial services company Nomura for five years. Prior to that, she was head of operations at private bank Coutts, as well as at Morgan Stanley, and spent about two years at Deutsche Bank as a business area controller. 

Kulyatin, who leads Cloudwall’s research, is a former fintech founder and has more than a decade of quant research experience in hedge funds, asset management and market-making.

“We have all faced off with trading desks, quant analysts and portfolio managers in the past and know what they need and expect,” Downey said. “It’s a much higher bar than a lot of what has been built for retail traders.” 

Cloudwall’s $6.3 million in seed funding, which the company revealed on Wednesday, was led by LocalGlobe and Illuminate Financial. Other investors in the round included IA Capital Partners, Eberg Capital and NEMO Ventures. 

The capital will go toward building cloud-based platform Serenity, which will allow investors to pull in their portfolios and access historical data from centralized exchanges and blockchains. Its statistical and machine-learning algorithms will also enable institutions to run simulations and stress tests on their portfolios to see how they will behave.

While such platforms and services exist in traditional finance — such as Moody’s Analytics and BlackRock’s Aladdin — such offerings are scarce in the digital assets space, executives said.

The next wave of hedge fund managers and asset managers entering the crypto space will be coming from the traditional finance world rather than from Silicon Valley, Downey argued. They will carry with them an understanding around the importance of risk management, which will help the crypto space mature, he added. 

“We believe a solution that can help manage digital asset risks will bring trillions of dollars in institutional funds to the blockchain,” Downey said.


Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.

Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter.

Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more.

The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.

Tags

Upcoming Events

Javits Center North | 445 11th Ave

Tues - Thurs, March 18 - 20, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Flashnote Template Presentation (2).jpg

Research

With the recent election, it’s clear that there will be a meaningful shift in crypto regulations and legislation. Trump is likely as pro-crypto as a president can be. He launched (multiple) of his own NFT collections and is launching an Aave wrapper called World Liberty Fi. He has also spoken out and mentioned that he wants to make the United States "the crypto capital of the planet" and transform it into the "Bitcoin superpower of the world". He proposed creating a strategic national Bitcoin stockpile alongside support from Senator Cynthia Lummis, promising to retain 100% of all Bitcoin held by the U.S. government. More importantly, we’re likely to see deregulation across the board in a lot of industries, with crypto being one of them - as Trump has committed to keeping the crypto market largely unregulated. Crypto, DeFi in particular, has historically been knee-capped by overreaching and hostile governmental agencies and regulation by enforcement, as evidenced by the plethora of Wells notices and lawsuits over the past few years. With Donald Trump winning the presidency, Republicans taking control of the Senate, and being on the verge of securing the House, we think it’s likely that crypto realizes positive regulatory clarity. Below, you can find our analysts’ takes:

article-image

Researcher Justin Drake’s Beam Chain proposal aims to transform Ethereum’s consensus layer with zk proofs and post-quantum cryptography

article-image

Gunzilla’s Theodore Agranat said that blockchain technology helps “enhance’ gamer experience

article-image

BTC continues to smash expectations as it holds near $90,000

article-image

Inflation is higher than it was in 2016, and the Fed is just at the beginning of its rate-cutting cycle

article-image

Bitwise’s Matt Hougan expects BTC to hit $100,000 by the end of the year and continue upward in 2025

article-image

Midwest Blockchain Week showed the depth of talent available at US universities while focusing on how memecoins could bring back the retail investor