Elliptic, the dealers in Blockchain Analytics tools recently announced raising $23m funds in a round by Japan’s Holdings in SBI. The move is aimed at expanding the reach of the start-up, across Asia.
SBI is the independently operating entity of SoftBank and previously had been in the limelight due to its associations with the blockchain firms including Ripple, R3, etc. Elliptic is also backed by the investor Spanish bank Santander.
Elliptic began its operations in 2013 and managed to raise over $12m as funding from rounds in five seed & Series A. In December during the final round led by SignalFire it raised $5m.
Based in London, Elliptic trades analytics tools for blockchain dealing with the world’s renowned cryptocurrency exchanges and financial institutions like Binance, Circle, etc. The company’s products can be employed to investigate the thefts and crimes that happen on the digital ledger of Bitcoin and assess the transactions to monitor money laundering.
After learning the employment of a donation website by the Military unit of Hamas, Qassam Brigades will generate a distinct cryptocurrency wallet address assigned to each visiting individual. This will make it difficult to track down the money and its destination. The group is known as an Israeli terrorist organization.
“Because we are always on top of what’s about to happen, we can see when those funds start to move to exchanges,” Elliptic’s co-founder and CEO James Smith told CNBC in a phone interview. “We were able to let our customers know that these funds were heading towards them, and they were able to stop them.”
Also, a part of the round were household names like AlbionVC and other concurrent investors like SignalFire, Santander Innoventures, and Octopus Ventures.
James Smith also spoke that Tokyo & Singapore were enticing places due to their vibrant communities in the crypto world and its technologically advanced regulatory authority in the jurisdictions.
His exact words being:
The Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Japanese Financial Services Agency are very well-versed in crypto. Japan has its own licensing scheme for exchanges; I think all that is really key to the growth of crypto because once you set the ground rules, then businesses can engage and innovate.
There’s going to be a strong market push together, where we will be working hard with SBI to capture the Japanse market and then the Asian market more broadly,
Smith added.
Elliptic is expected to open offices across Singapore & Japan. Japan being an epitome of a nation that’s demonstrated more progress in the field than the rest, Smith said, with prime financial institutions investigating methods of giving cryptocurrency offerings to the customers. It also reported an increase in revenues across by at least ten times since last year.