Soros Fund Backs Lukka’s $53 million Series D Funding Round

Digital asset data provider Lukka is cashing in big on bitcoin’s latest run. 

Billionaire investor George Soros’ fund has backed Lukka in a $53 million Series D fundraise, the fintech company announced Thursday. The announcement comes shortly after Lukka’s Series C fundraise, led by State Street, was finalized in December. 

“We were solicited to accept some more capital in order to accelerate pretty much everything that we were already doing, so we don’t have any crazy plans to reinvent our products or anything, honestly, we’ve already done that over the last 18 months,” Lukka Co-CEO Robert Materazzi told Blockworks. “This capital is really meant to help us continue to support our customers as the industry rapidly innovates.” 

Lukka currently serves more than 200 active cryptocurrency funds and provides digital asset data to both traditional and cryptocurrency firms, including S&P Dow Jones Indices. 

Institutional interest in digital assets has exploded over the past year, and it’s something that Materazzi saw coming. He made the decision to leave his financial services position at PwC in 2018. 

“I joined Lukka about two and a half years ago, and one of the reasons that I joined was because they were building products, software and data products that were meant to be for institutions,” said Materazzi. “It seems like it’s been a domino effect of press releases, and big, big companies like Tesla getting some exposure to Bitcoin to start, and then usually, the rest of the coins follow from there.” 

Last month, former Birdgewater Co-CEO Eileen Murray joined Lukka’s advisory board, demonstrating the recent trend of traditional finance players moving into the digital asset space. 

Lukka has raised nearly $75 million in the past year from investors including Soros, S&P Global, CPA.com and State Street, according to the company.