Bitcoin Company NYDIG Raises $1 Billion in Latest Funding Round at a Valuation of $7B

Bitcoin financial services company NYDIG announced this week that it had raised $1 billion in its latest funding round led by VC firm WestCap at a valuation of more than $7 billion.

Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Morgan Stanley, New York Life, Mass Mutual, FIS, Fiserv, and Affirm holdings also participated in the round.

“The prospects for both NYDIG and Bitcoin have never been more exciting,” said co-founder and CEO of NYDIG, Robert Gutmann, in a statement.

Back in March of this year, NYDIG raised $200 million led by MassMutual, New York Life, and Morgan Stanley, and then a month later, it raised another $100 million.

The company’s latest $1 billion funding tops crypto derivatives exchange FTX’s $900 million round announced in July. FTX is reportedly raising another $1.5 billion funding round at a $32 billion valuation.

NYDIG, a subsidiary of Stone Ridge, operates a full-stack bitcoin platform and offers bitcoin trading and custody services to financial technology, insurance, and banking firms.

The company intends to use the fresh capital for asset tokenization, further develop its bitcoin platform and its existing payment capabilities. Instead of focusing on retail, NYDIG is working on enabling the incumbents to be able to offer access to Bitcoin. It aims to embed Bitcoin wallets into all kinds of applications.

“Betting on a company like NYDIG is literally a bet on Bitcoin. There’s no world where NYDIG will flourish without BTC performing well,” commented Zaheer Ebtikar of Deribit Insights.

As of writing, the leading cryptocurrency is trading above $48,500, down about 30% from its all-time high of $69,000 from last month.

Gaining Big Names In Its Corner

This week, digital asset financial platform Anchorage Digital also raised $350 million in a funding round that lifted its valuation to $3 billion, led by private equity firm KKR & Co.

Goldman Sachs, a16z, Apollo credit funds, and Wellington Management, among other investors, also participated in the funding round of the regulated platform that provides trading, custody, and lending services as well as infrastructure for other companies to build crypto products.

The company received its banking charts from the OCC in January this year and planned to get equivalent registrations in other countries as well.

The latest funding will be used to accelerate Anchorage’s international expansion.

“We wanted to make sure that all these big investment names are in our corner because Anchorage is expanding really heavily toward larger financial institutions,” said Diogo Mónica, president and co-founder of Anchorage, in an interview.