Tervetuloa Tesseract! (It means ‘welcome’ in finnish)
For a year now, the crypto landscape has been booming. Despite the recent volatility and decrease in values, crypto market cap remains above $1TN. What’s maybe more important is that we are witnessing more and more participation from institutional players to the crypto game: there has been Tesla’s $1.5-billion investment in Bitcoin in February, BlackRock authorizing two of its funds to invest in bitcoin futures in January or Visa’s direct acceptance of payments in cryptocurrency (USD Coin) in March.
Retail users are no longer the only ones to be excited by the potential of crypto…
As these new players come into the market, use cases will likely continue to diversify and the appetite for crypto financial services will increase. In particular, many participants are now willing to earn interests on their holdings, while others wish to borrow money to finance their trading operations or purchasing of assets.
Pain point is: those operations often require significant effort, like manually entering into one-off OTC deals, or building complex technical integrations with decentralized finance protocols.
That’s precisely where Tesseract enters the game: founded in 2018 in Finland, Tesseract focuses on the highly growing digital asset lending market, serving institutional borrowers & lenders with its innovative solutions.
Today, we’re glad to participate to Tesseract’s $25 million Series A funding round led by Augmentum Fintech, alongside many co-investors.
Why do we think Tesseract is a crypto gem?
- We have been really impressed by the 2 co-founders Yichen Wu and Ilkka Salo, and their exceptional team
- They have developed an elegant and highly automated infrastructure layer for digital lending, connecting both institutional borrowers and lenders
- The company has found a strong product-market fit, with significant lending operations already and a profitable model, which is “incredibly rare for a VC backed company growing this fast”, as co-founder Wu recalls
- They differentiate from competitors by 3 aspects: their deep focus on credit and risk, their independence and their agility
- The company is regulated with a license from the Finnish Financial Supervisory Authority, and so uniquely positioned to capture this high-growing market
We’re super excited about our first investment in crypto, and eager to help Tesseract scaling the business further and further — alongside co-investors Augmentum Fintech, Concentric, DN Capital, Jabre Capital Partners Family Office, LeadBlock Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Wintermute, Woorton and Icebreaker.vc.
