Funding Wrap: Partior raises $60M to support ‘international network growth’

A little under a hundred million dollars was raised by the funding rounds mentioned in this week’s roundup.

The biggest round came from blockchain payment network Partior, which raised $60 million in a Series B. The blockchain payment network’s round was led by Peak XV Partners and also saw contributions from Jump Trading Group and Valor Capital Group.

The network is a joint venture between founding shareholders JPMorgan and Temasek — which both participated in this round as a previous investor — as well as DBS. Standard Chartered is also part of the joint venture, and an investor in this round. 

Read more from our opinion section: The future of finance? TradFi plus DeFi

“Improving liquidity management for both corporate and financial institutions is imperative in a world where many companies operate ‘round the clock globally,” the company said in a press release. Standard Chartered, JPMorgan and DBS all use Partior. 

“This new round of funding will enable the advancement of new capabilities like Intraday FX swaps, Cross-currency repos, Programmable Enterprise Liquidity Management, and Just-in-Time multi-bank payments. The investment will significantly support Partior’s international network growth and the integration of additional currencies,” the release continued. Right now, Partior supports USD, SGD and EUR. 

Speaking of traditional financial players, let’s take a look at a pre-seed round from Tread.Fi.

Read more: How the latest TradFi blockchain trial could mark the ‘five-yard-line’ for mass adoption

The crypto-native algorithmic trading infrastructure company is helmed by former Morgan Stanley VP of quantitative research, David Jeong. 

Earlier this week, the firm announced a $3.5 million pre-seed investment round led by New Form Capital. Aquanow and Varys Capital also participated in the round. 

Tread.fi, which includes portfolio management tools and various features such as advanced execution algorithms, also allows for its clients to run the trading engine in-house privately, per a press release. 

“This layer of separation gives clients a unique level of privacy and ownership over their trading and is a unique advantage for routing orders to crypto-native exchanges, which often have open access that allows all users to view trading activity,” the firm said.  

Jeong said that his firm aims to “modernize institutional digital asset trading.”

Other notable raises:

• Blast-based token distribution protocol ZAP announced a $15 million raise. The round was led by Rarestone, Cypher Capital and Sharding Capital. 
• Crypto startup Rome Protocol raised $9 million to bring modular services on Solana to the Ethereum network.*
• DeFi fixed-rate lending protocol Term Finance announced it raised $5.5 million. The round was led by Electric Capital.

* Blockworks co-founder Jason Yanowitz and Empire podcast host Santiago Santos participated in the round.

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