Today TradeIX announced a new investment round of $16m led by ING Ventures. The additional Series A investors were BNP Paribas, Tech Mahindra, and existing investor Kistefos.
TradeIX is a UK-based technology solution provider in the trade finance sector. TradeIX licenses its trade finance platform and apps to banks and integrates it with their existing infrastructure. Part of their solution is connectivity between banks as well as corporates using distributed ledger technology.
The company is a technology partner in the Marco Polo open account trade finance consortium, alongside R3. ING and BNP Paribas are members of Marco Polo as well as the R3 Letters of Credit consortium Voltron.
Apart from Marco Polo, the company recently released the first blockchain-enabled trade finance transaction for global logistics company DHL.
The company plans to use the funds to hire more staff and further develop its open platform for trade finance. Additionally, they plan to invest in marketing activities to accelerate customer acquisition.
TradeIX CEO and Founder Rob Barnes said: “This round is a significant stepping stone for us. We are very excited to bring in ING Ventures, BNP Paribas, Tech Mahindra as new investors, and to continue our partnership with Kistefos. After having proven our technology with DHL and multiple banks, the investment will help us to further develop our open platform.”
Mark Buitenhek, Head of Transaction Services of ING highlighted: “TradeIX offers a great solution for trade finance that truly enables clients to become more efficient and transparent. TradeIX operates via an open platform and ‘open’ is what ING thinks the future of financial services is going to be. On top of that, we see a lot of opportunity in distributed ledger technology. So we’re happy to announce we are now intensifying our cooperation with TradeIX.”
ING is somewhat active in this space. A month ago HSBC issued a Letter of Credit (LoC) to ING in the first live LoC blockchain transaction.
