Digital Currency Group (DCG) the parent company of Luno has closed a second investment round.
The funding round was led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund II and Latin American Fund with participation from other equity investors which included Google’s Capital G, Ribbit Capital, GIC, Tribe Capital, and Emory University in purchasing more than $700 million of DCG stock from existing investors.
This transaction values the Luno parent company now at $10 billion. Without selling any shares as part of the secondary transaction, Barry Silbert, DCG Founder, and CEO has raised $25mm in primary capital since the company was formed in 2015.
DCG has now invested in more than 200 blockchain companies in more than 30 countries around the world with expected revenue to hit $1 billion in 2021.
At the parent company level, DCG now has 30 employees, while across the entire organization, including, including its wholly-owned subsidiaries, it has 1,000 employees in 10 offices on 4 continents.
Several notable companies have emerged as digital asset leaders under DCG and some of them include:
Luno is a consumer-focused digital asset platform that has thrived in the emerging and frontier markets, providing digital asset education, knowledge, and investment tools to customers in Africa, Asia, and Europe. The company has grown from 2 to more than 9 million customers worldwide since 2019, and Luno is expanding to the US in 2022.
Grayscale Investments is the world’s largest digital currency asset manager with more than $50 billion in assets under management and 15 different investments products, including the largest Bitcoin (GBTC) and Ethereum (ETHE) funds in the world.
Genesis is a full-service digital currency prime brokerage and one of the leading institutional trading and lending firms in the world, facilitating hundreds of billions of dollars in annual trades, loans, and transactions. Recently surpassed $65 billion in loan originations and acquired a custodian in 2020. Genesis is a FINRA-registered broker-dealer and has a NY Bitlicense.
Foundry, founded in 2019, has emerged as one of the most successful bitcoin mining and digital asset staking companies in North America. They provide equipment financing and procurement, mining advisory services, and host North America’s largest Bitcoin mining pool (Foundry USA), which is one of the fastest growing mining pools in the world. Foundry USA is consistently a top 5 global mining pool.
CoinDesk is a premier financial media, data, index, and events company, recently pulling in more than 30 million UVs in a single month. CoinDesk also acquired TradeBlock in 2020 and today, the re-branded CoinDesk Indexes tracks more than $50 billion in AUM.
TradeBlock is building an institutional-grade data and trading platform.
Luno and TradeBlock join CoinDesk as wholly-owned subsidiaries that were formerly DCG portfolio companies – DCG participated in all three companies’ seed rounds years before the acquisitions. It’s a testament to the strength and success of their venture portfolio.
In addition to its venture portfolio and subsidiary companies, DCG has also expanded its investment focus:
- Long recognized as the most active digital asset seed-stage investor in the world, DCG is expanding seed-stage investing into new and emerging geographies
- Building a team focused on public equity investing
- Backing many more emerging fund managers as LPs
- Leading and participating in “follow on” financing rounds
- DCG will also continue to uncover opportunities through new increased investments in digital tokens and other digital assets.
- Building a credit team to grow our lending efforts to companies in the industry
- All of these investments total several billion dollars
Don’t miss important articles during the week. Subscribe to techbuild weekly digest for updates
