Today payments firm Ripple said it had raised $200 million in a Series C round led by Tetragon. SBI Holdings with which Ripple has its SBI Ripple Asia joint venture also participated. And the third investor was Route 66 the venture capital firm which led the Series A round of Clearmatics, the developer behind the Utility Settlement Coin.
Tetragon is a diversified asset management firm with a net asset value of $2.25 billion as of the end of October. It’s listed on both the London Stock Exchange and Euronext where it has a market capitalization of $1.7 billion. The firm has significant private equity investments, as well as investing in “event-driven equities”, bonds, bank loans, and real estate.
Commenting on the Series C, Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse stated: “We are in a strong financial position to execute against our vision. As others in the blockchain space have slowed their growth or even shut down, we have accelerated our momentum and industry leadership throughout 2019.”
The payments company used the announcement to give a summary of 2019 achievements. These include 10x growth in transactions and the customer count for the Ripple Network reaching 300. Additionally, Xpring, which initially focused on investments, launched itself as a developer platform providing tools to enable third party providers to use Ripple’s Interledger technology and the XRP currency. And earlier in the year Ripple invested in payments firm Moneygram.
In another announcement yesterday, Forte, a blockchain games company which is helping Xpring to manage a $100 game million fund, unveiled a deal with Kongregate a popular gaming community with eight million users. The plan is to roll out player rewards that use Ripple’s technology.
