April 21, 2021, 10:06AM EDT · 1 min read
Enterprise blockchain firm Digital Asset Holdings has raised $120 million in a Series D funding round.
Investment firms 7Ridge and Eldridge backed the round. Carsten Kengeter and Veronica Augustsson of 7Ridge have also joined Digital Asset's board.
With fresh capital at hand, Digital Asset is aiming to expand its team by 50% this year and introduce a new interoperability protocol.
The firm's core product, the open-source DAML smart contract language, works on both blockchains and centralized databases for synchronizing data. Its clients include the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), BNP Paribas, and Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, among others.
"Without DAML, workflows cannot be shared privately and securely within and across organizations, leading to inconsistent data, expensive to adapt architectures, and a lack of common interfaces," said Digital Asset co-founder and CEO Yuval Rooz in a statement.
Last year, Digital Asset tripled its customer base, with 50% of new business coming from non-blockchain deployments, according to the firm's CFO and COO Emnet Rios. "We saw significant demand for DAML to solve internal challenges of data silos within an organization," she said. "As a result, we expanded our product portfolio to support 10 different underlying ledgers, including traditional databases."
Besides DAML, Digital Asset is best known for working on ASX's blockchain transition project for clearing and settlement. The project started in 2016, and the go-live date has been delayed several times. The ASX now targets a 2023 launch. Rooz told Bloomberg that the exchange could start industrywide testing by this year's end.
The Series D brings Digital Asset's total funding to $142.2 million, according to Crunchbase. Its Series C, which closed last year, raised $45 million.