$40 Million: Digital Asset Holdings Closes Series B Fundraising

Digital Asset Holdings LLC has raised $40 million in a Series B round, bringing the enterprise blockchain startup's total funding so far to $110 million.

Jefferson River Capital led the funding round, which included new and previous investors.

Digital Asset, founded by Wall Street veteran Blythe Masters, has also hired Clyde Rodriguez, a former Microsoft executive, as chief information officer and chief technology officer for engineering, a newly created position. Rodriguez will join the firm's executive committee and report to CEO Masters.

Masters, a former top executive at JPMorgan Chase, was an early proponent of using distributed ledger technology to modernize financial services.

In a press release today, she said:

"The addition of Clyde and the closing of our Series B financing position Digital Asset to capitalize on the enormous opportunities we see."

New hire Rodriguez is also a former co-CTO of Two Sigma Investments with 20 years of experience in enterprise software and cloud development. At Microsoft he formed and led the Azure cloud networking group as general manager. Earlier, he led Microsoft's Windows division in creating and delivering the first 64-bit Windows client and server operating systems.

Digital Asset, or DA, as it now calls itself (having dropped the "Holdings" from marketing materials), has kept a relatively low profile recently compared to rivals R3 and Ripple. Far from idle, though, the firm's been building a distributed ledger settlement platform for the Australian Securities Exchange, one of its investors, since January 2016. However, the exchange has yet not committed to using the system, and has given itself a deadline of December to choose whether it will do so or pursue a more traditional upgrade.

Blythe Masters image via the CoinDesk archive