Abu Dhabi Further Ventures leads Series A round in French developed crypto wallet

Further Ventures, an Abu Dhabi private equity fund, backed by sovereign wealth fund ADQ, has invested in French DFNS, a digital assets wallet and custody solution developer which has just raised $16 million in a series A round. The startup notes that it is competing with the likes of Fireblocks and Ledger.

As per the press release, the startup which was launched in 2020 with offices in Paris and New York, will use the investments to accelerate its development with major financial institutions.

The deal was led by Abu Dhabi Further Ventures with participation from White Star Capital, Hashed, Semantic, Techstars and Bpifrance. The valuation of DFNS, which had already raised €13 million ($12 million) in 2022, is not public.

“This deal validates both our product and our focus on fintechs and financial players,” explains Clarisse Hagège, co-founder and CEO of DFNS, which claims more than 130 customers including Fidelity, Zodia Custody (Standard Chartered’s crypto subsidiary) and Stripe, which has just acquired Bridge.

Launched in 2020, DFNS has developed a wallet creation solution based on MPC (Multi-Party Computation) technology. MPC technology breaks down the access keys to the digital wallet into fragments; these are then distributed across different secure universes.

DFNS is a strong contender in the digital asset wallet market

DFNS enjoys various strengths including modularity. Utilizing the API system, the 25-strong start-up allows developers to take bricks and create, in partnership with DFNS, their own wallet system according to their needs.

“We allow our customers to deploy their own instances on public clouds like AWS, private clouds, and connect their Thales or IBM HSMs to our blockchain transaction management system,” explains Clarisse Hagège.

Another strength is the price. While not all offers are the same, DFNS billing system is based on usage and not on volumes under management. “DFNS is clearly one of the cheapest players on the market”, confirms one company, which is not even a client of theirs.

Further Ventures, has invested in Kemet Trading which provides the first true institutional single-access point into the digital asset derivative ecosystem, Tungsten a custodian of virtual assets, and Twinstake which offers staking services, among others.

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