Blockchain Capital Leads $25M Funding Round for Libra Member Bison Trails

Blockchain protocol provider Bison Trails has secured a $25.5 million Series A funding round led by Blockchain Capital to develop the firm’s infrastructure services.

Coinbase Ventures, ConsenSys, Kleiner Perkins, A Capital, Collaborative Fund and Sound Ventures joined the latest round as new investors, while early backers, including Galaxy Digital and Initialized, made follow-up investments after a $5.25 million seed round in March.

Bison Trails declined to disclose further financial terms of deal.

The Series A round came after the startup was included as one of the 21 founding members for Facebook’s Libra Association in October, boosting its reputation as a global infrastructure service provider, CEO Joe Lallouz said in an interview.

“As the only blockchain infrastructure firm in the Libra project, we'll contribute to building the new system with Facebook,” Lallouz said, adding that it was the tech giant that approached Bison Trails earlier in the year for the role on the founding team.

Formed in 2018, the New York-based startup uses its protocols to help customers deploy the participation nodes on any blockchain, without having to develop their own security, dev ops, infrastructure, and protocol engineering competencies.

"We have become the easiest way to run infrastructure on multiple blockchains, and helped other protocols, companies and builders launch and manage distributed nodes on blockchain network,” Lallouz said noting the firm now serves more than 20 protocol projects.

Investing in infrastructure services

Bison Trails’ investors said they were betting on the increasing utility of the company’s infrastructure services.

Kleiner Perkins investing partner Monica Desai said: “Bison Trails realized early that node infrastructure would become a bottleneck to blockchain adoption, which is why they created a decentralized, user-friendly solution,” according to a statement.

Coinbase Ventures COO Emilie Choi said crypto networks will continue to move towards active network participation models such as staking, voting, signaling, further reinforcing the need for solutions such as those that Bison Trails provides.

Infrastructure protocols has seen a stream of significant investments in blockchain services.

Nervos completed its $72 million token sale and launched its mainnet this month, providing infrastructure for companies to build their projects on chain, while the Interchain Foundation has dedicated resources to developing its Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol.

Lallouz said the equity raise, rather than a token sale, keeps its interests inline with those of its customers.

“Without our own blockchain or tokens, we can actually better focus on offering the secured and scalable infrastructure layer for any blockchain platform with the new funding.” Lallouz said.