FalconX Raises $17 Million to Support Growing Institutional Demand for Crypto

FalconX, a digital asset trading platform that provides clients best execution, has secured $17M to fund the introduction of new products, expand FalconX’s trade execution suite and scale infrastructure to support growing institutional demand for cryptocurrency. The firm is expanding its regulatory footprint to continue growing its customer base across new jurisdictions and product lines.

The capital raise had the participation of a number of accredited investors including Accel, Accomplice VC, Coinbase Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Avon Ventures.

 

Shekhar Kirani, General Partner at Accel, said: “FalconX demonstrated exceptional growth with institutional counterparties through their focus on technology and reliability during volatile market conditions. They’ve proven themselves at scale without compromising on enterprise-grade security and high compliance standards – capturing a tremendous opportunity to serve the next generation of institutions looking to enter the digital asset space.”

FalconX has generated $7 billion in global trading volume at a quarterly growth rate of over 600 percent over the last 10 months. FalconX has built robust liquidity through a combination of lit liquidity pools (exchanges) and proprietary dark pools, with a client base that includes over 100 financial institutions across traditional finance including hedge funds, proprietary trading firms, payment gateways, over-the-counter trading desks, cryptocurrency miners, and exchanges.

Raghu Yarlagadda, FalconX CEO and co-founder, said: “We’re entering an era defined by the true digitization of value – whether Bitcoin, Ethereum or new experiments such as Libra, or Digital Yuan – much like what we saw in the early 2000s with the digitization of information on the internet. For open, permissionless and truly global digital assets to be adopted by mainstream institutions, today’s digital financial infrastructure is grossly inadequate. FalconX is building the connective tissue, with seamless price discovery, trade execution, and value transfer. Our technology will provide the infrastructure for the future of digital assets.”

CMT Digital, a proprietary trading and financial services firm founded in 1997, with offices across US & Europe, is an avid user of the firm’s services. “FalconX allows us to operate a more productive trading desk by solving for some of the major inefficiencies in the crypto markets. I have been extremely impressed with FalconX’s relentless focus on delivering value-added solutions and superior customer service”, said Brad Koeppen, Head of Trading and Business
Development at CMT Digital.

Created in 2018, the founding team blends Silicon Valley and Wall Street, bringing experience from Google, Citadel, Goldman Sachs, Jump Trading, PayPal, Pantera Capital, WorldQuant, Kraken, and PEAK6 Investments. Co-founder Raghu Yarlagadda has a background as an engineer and entrepreneur. He has held several product leadership roles prior to FalconX, including at Google, where he was instrumental in scaling Chromebooks to a multi-billion dollar revenue business. Prabhakar Reddy, the other co-founder, is an investor, engineer, and a serial entrepreneur who previously drove blockchain and enterprise SaaS investments at venture capital firm Accel.