The State of Investment into Security Token Infrastructure — Q4 2019
The year of security token infrastructure comes to a loud close with the largest quarter on record. The trend is only expected to continue.
It’s officially the new year and 2019 came to a close with 5x as much force as Q3, with more notable players picking up a majority of the investments and some new entrants making the list too. We accurately forecasted a stronger quarter in our last report, but the lion’s share is due to one company.
The punchline: Over $125,000,000 was deployed into infrastructure for security tokens in Q4–2019. That brings the total investment to date to around $790,000,000 with this quarter rebounding to be the largest on record.
We saw a lot of activity in this last quarter of the year in terms of company product launches, protocol upgrades, and new entrants. Notably, Figure raised a monster sum making it amongst the most funded companies in the space. Other notable players like Securitize, OpenFinance Network and Fundament Group also picked up more capital and strategic investors. It’s worth acknowledging that if we were to remove Figure from the calculation, the quarter maintained around the average for the year:
Q2: $35,000,000+
Q3: $20,000,000
Q4: $125,000,000+
Q4 (without Figure): $26,000,000+
Our prediction here at Security Token Advisors is that Q1 of 2020 will see continued fundraising from players around the world. We expect stronger quarters than Q2 and Q3 of last year but it will take another major financing — likely for an exchange — to break the $100,000,000 mark. However, with over a quarter of billion invested in the space to date, we have no doubt we will break over a billion invested in 2020, perhaps even in the first half.
As always, we will continue to update this list as we find new information. Our last update was on April 13th, 2020.
Read the Q3–2019 Market Report Here
Read the Q2–2019 Market Report Here
Read the Q1–2019 Market Report Here
Issuance Platforms
Figure, San Francisco — $103,000,000 (Previous financing of $135,000,000 in equity from Morgan Creek, Ribbit Capital, DST Global and $1,000,000,000 in debt for lending purposes)
Upvest, Berlin — €7,000,000
Cadence, New York — $4,000,000 investment from Revel VC
Securitize, San Francisco — Undisclosed investment from SBI (Previous financing of $26,000,000 from Santander, MUFG, Coinbase, and Ripple)
Fundament Group, Berlin — Undisclosed investment from Tezos Foundation (Previous undisclosed financing from Bauwens Group)
Daura, Zurich — Undisclosed investment from Swiss International Exchange
Exchanges
OpenFinance Network, Chicago — $8,600,000 (Previous undisclosed financing from Sharpe Ventures and Huobi)
iSTOx, Singapore — $4,580,000 (Previous undisclosed financing from Kiatnakin Phatra Financial Group)
Other Infrastructure Companies
No other infrastructure companies that raised money this quarter have been identified at this time.
ICO, Crowdfunding or FinTech Companies Also Offering STO Services**
Coinlist, San Francisco — $10,000,000 led by Jack Dorsey (Previous financing of $9,200,000)
Acquisitions
BUIDL, Japan — Undisclosed sale to Securitize
Currently fundraising category (notable mentions):
INX, Gibraltar — Announced intentions to do up to $130,000,000 IPO in the US (Previous financing of $4,900,000)
Horizon Globex, New York — $5,000,000
MERJ, Seychelles — $4,000,000 Tokenized IPO
Smartlands, London — Announced intentions to STO
We will continue to update this list with missing information about Q4. Stay tuned and subscribe to see the Q1 report in April!
*Also does issuance.
**Not applied towards the total investment into Security Token Infrastructure due to some of the capital being invested towards non-security token infrastructure.
