Crypto Lender Vauld Raises $25M in Series A Funding Round
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The crypto lending and trading platform Vauld has raised $25 million in its Series A funding round.
US-based venture capital firm Valar Ventures, co-founded by Peter Thiel, led the round. Participants also included Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, CMT Digital, Gumi Cryptos, Robert Leshner, and Cadenza Capital.
According to a statement on the company website, Vauld intends this latest multimillion cash injection to go towards scaling its team. Reports indicate they aim to fill at least 100 new roles. The funding will also finance Vauld’s international growth and licensing, and the expansion of their retail crypto banking and investment offering efforts.
While headquartered in Singapore, most of Vauld’s team is based in India. Since their inception in 2018, the company has raised a total of $27 million in capital.
“This infusion of capital could not have come at a better time,” the company statement said. “Over the past year, Vauld has expanded its global user base over 200x, and our quarter-over-quarter growth in AUM [assets under management] increased 124.4% from Q1-Q2 2021.
“Valar’s investment is a true testament to the optimism we share for the large and emergent Indian market, as well as our goal of becoming a full-stack global digital banking platform.”
Vauld offers its users a range of products with which they can earn, lend, and borrow cryptocurrency funds. It also allows bank transfers with manual settlement; something that served as a stopgap solution when Indian banks first started severing ties with cryptocurrency exchanges in June, leading to struggles in payment processing.
Vauld suffers downtime
The platform first announced its Series A financing on July 29. On the same day, the company reported some unplanned downtime from the day before, stemming from “unusual buy orders” for BTC (BTC) on Vauld. This resulted in around three hours of downtime for the platform. On their official Twitter account, Vauld clarified that their systems “detected this anomaly and disabled withdrawals protecting all funds.”
Darshan Bathija, co-founder and CEO of Vauld, also took to Twitter to advise users that all incorrect orders had since been reversed.
Bathija also clarified that the anomaly was not the result of a hack; rather, low liquidity on the BTC:INR pairing in its first minute following release. This liquidity enabled a BTC order to go through at a very low rate.
“That rate was used as a benchmark for 6 other orders,” Bathija advised a Twitter user.
The post Crypto Lender Vauld Raises $25M in Series A Funding Round appeared first on BeInCrypto.
