‘Bloomberg for digital assets’ bags $75m from Accel, a16z, others

In October, investors piled into a new cryptocurrency inspired by Squid Game, the popular Netflix series. The token’s value skyrocketed by 300% within the first 10 minutes of trading.

Five minutes later, the token was traded at US$0.0007 – down from its initial peak of US$2,856.65. It was criticized for not allowing people to resell their tokens, which crypto investors refer to as a “rug pull”.

The crash of the Squid token underscores the growing need for analysis and research into cryptocurrencies as investors look to secure their digital assets in a highly volatile market.

Singapore-based Nansen, which has been called the “Bloomberg for digital assets” by investors, helps investors make informed decisions around project discovery, due diligence, and trading. The startup recently picked up US$75 million in a series B financing round.

The Nansen team / Photo credit: Nansen

The company analyses on-chain data points, wallet labels, and entities on blockchains such as Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, Fantom, Avalanche, and Celo, among others.

Founded in 2020, Nansen is used by retail investors as well as institutional investors such as Three Arrows Capital, DeFiance Capital, Genesis Block Ventures, Not3Lau Capital, Polychain, YBS Capital, and Acheron Trading.

Additionally, it is also used by Polygon, Lido, and Sky Mavis, which runs the popular blockchain game, Axie Infinity – each has seen more than a 20x increase in subscribers over the past year.

Stacking coins

Accel led Nansen’s latest funding round, while GIC, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Tiger Global, and SCB 10X, which is the tech and innovation arm of Thailand’s Siam Commercial Bank (SCB), also participated. Other investors that joined the round include Amplify Partners, L1 Digital, Skyfall Ventures, Folius Ventures, and Old Fashion Research.

Image credit: Timmy Loen

Angel investors including Anastasia Andrianova, CEO of Akropolis; Cristóbal Conde, chairman of Fimatix; Adam White, president of Bakkt; and Prabhakar Reddy, co-founder of FalconX, also took part in the round.

“It’s a strategic round for us because we got some strong backers on board who can help us break out of the crypto bubble and reach new customer segments, both on the individual side and the institutional side,” said Alex Svanevik, co-founder and CEO of Nansen told Tech in Asia.

Nansen will use the funds to hire more developers and research analysts as well as to expand the platform’s features and multichain integrations at a global scale.

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