Blockchain Capital Leads $1.7 Million Round for Crypto Compliance Startup

Venture capital firm Blockchain Capital has led a $1.7 million seed round for San Francisco-based crypto compliance startup TRM Labs.

Announcing the news on Thursday, TRM said other participating investors included Tapas Capital, Green D Ventures and The MBA Fund.

Founded in 2017, TRM is a regulatory technology startup that aims to streamline compliance in the crypto industry. The seed funding will go toward scaling its engineering team and further developing its token relationship management platform, it said.

“We believe that cryptocurrency is going to be a democratizing force in the world that lets anyone exchange value and access financial services. But to get there, we need to make it easier for everyone to be compliant,” said TRM CEO and co-founder Esteban Castaño.

TRM’s first product, its token relationship management platform, is designed to help crypto companies streamline their anti-money laundering (AML) compliance efforts, offering customer due diligence, transaction monitoring and customer relationship management, the firm said.

The company is also working on building other platforms using big data and machine learning to automatically detect suspicious activities like money laundering and market manipulation.

Blockchain Capital – which has a portfolio that boasts names like Coinbase, Ripple, Circle and Kraken – has set up several funds seeking to invest in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space. Ripple invested $25 million-worth of XRP tokens in its Parallel IV venture fund last April.

More recently, in November 2018, Blockchain Capital led a $13 million Series A funding round for security token startup Securitize, a firm that aims to digitize traditional securities products on a blockchain.

Blockchain Capital partner Spencer Bogart image via CoinDesk archives