Radar Relay Raises $10 Million for Decentralized Token Exchange

Decentralized token exchange Radar Relay has completed a $10 million Series A funding round.

The funding effort was led by industry investment firm Blockchain Capital, the startup announced Wednesday. Tusk Ventures, Distributed Global, Reciprocal Ventures, Elefund, Slow Ventures, SV Angel, Kindred Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Breyer Capital, V1.VC, Kokopelli, Village Global, Chapter One and Digital Currency Group also contributed funds.

The money will be used to expand the startup's community team and start new research and development projects, according to CEO Alan Curtis. The funding effort comes after Radar Relay raised $3 million in December 2017 in a round also led by Blockchain Capital.

Radar Relay provides a wallet-to-wallet trading platform for ethereum tokens. Investors can connect their wallets to the platform to exchange tokens directly, without the startup ever taking any tokens into custody.

The company sought to raise the funds due to the platform's popularity, Curtis added. While the platform appears to be widely used, only a small portion comes from the U.S., which makes providing support for the vast majority of Radar Relay's users difficult.

The company now hopes to expand the team in order to help reduce some of these concerns.

Curtis explained:

"We are supporting users from 150 countries. Of those countries, less than a third of our users are from the United States, which means we have to have core competencies in those [other] countries. Part of this funding is to establish a community ambassador program in those countries so we can serve our customers abroad."

The community ambassador program will see Radar Relay hire individuals fluent in various languages and able to provide support for users, he said. But according to Curtis, the startup's beta phase saw a notable amount of activity from users.

"We just left beta about a month ago and during that beta we saw $150 million in transaction volume," he said.

As such, expanding the team to meet support demand will be a key focus for the next month or so. Alongside that, Curtis added, the firm plans to start exploring how to support security tokens and crypto collectibles.

Ethereum token wallet image via Shutterstock