Source: pymnts.com
The crypto sleuthing firm says its tools monitor $1 trillion worth of transactions every month.
Crypto investigations company Chainalysis said Thursday it raised $170 million in a funding round that valued the blockchain analytics software developer at $8.6 billion.
GIC led the Series F; Accel, Blackstone (BX), Dragoneer, Bank of New York Mellon (BK) and others also participated, a press release said. Chainalysis previously raised $100 million in June 2021 at half its current valuation.
With ever more digital asset hacks, scams and ransomware attacks grabbing global headlines, the demand for investigatory crypto tools is exploding, Chainalysis said its various tools monitor $1 trillion worth of transactions every month. It helps governments and private companies in tracking illicit crypto flows across transparent public blockchains.
The hulking software-as-a-service company says its customer base increased 75% to 750 total. Big spenders with $100,000+ accounts are also on the rise (a single premium seat can cost tens of thousands of dollars).
Chainalysis now has a presence in 70 countries and intends to invest big in regions outside its U.S. base.
“A global expansion is one of the drivers here,” CEO Michael Gronager said in an interview. He said Chainalysis is “continuously doubling down” in Europe, Asia-Pacific and South America – a particular hotbed for growth.
Against all this is a proliferation of “more use cases for crypto” (think: non-fungible tokens and decentralized finance exchanges) that clients need to monitor, label, profile and track. “We are constantly building new products” to keep up, Gronager said.
Its team now weighs in at 700, more than half of whom arrived in the past year. Chainalysis is aggressively hiring C-suite officials from big-name entities across the public policy and market structure worlds.
All this for a company whose short-term fate isn’t quite so shackled to token prices. Criminals will keep doing crimes in up markets or down. And governments and companies will pay to get ahead of them.
Gronager said he’s not worried about this week’s market tumult. It’s during the quiet sideways markets to come that stablecoins, NFTs and layer 2s get built, he said. “There’s a lot of smart things to develop,” he said.
And as they come about, the company will introduce new crypto vectors to profile and track.
