Recently, FTX Trading Ltd. announced that it has closed the largest capital raise in crypto exchange history in a Series B funding round for $900 million, valuing the Company at $18 billion.
Well, the crypto exchange FTX has seen a number of partnerships and growth in 2021 and following the firm’s Series A financing round last year, the company in Series B raised $900 million from over 60 investors. The firm said that since the last funding round, its revenues have increased 75x and it now has over one million users.
Founded and led by Sam Bankman-Fried, a 29-year-old crypto billionaire, FTX has grown into one of the world's leading crypto exchanges, having over $10B of daily trading volume. The FTX platform serves the entire chain of cryptocurrency trading participants from retail and crypto-native investors, to sophisticated day traders, family offices, and experienced institutional traders.
Source: FTX
The Series B funding round saw participation from over 60 investors, including venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, private equity giant Thoma Bravo, Daniel Loeb's Third Point, the Paul Tudor Jones family, SoftBank, Ribbit Capital, Insight Partners, and British hedge fund manager Alan Howard.
The firm said that the funds will help FTX to further expand its product offerings and user base. The firm will also look to further expand the network of partnerships it has for its FTX Pay, FTX Liquidity program & FTX NFT business lines. The investment process was led by the FTX's own ventures team, with help from Paradigm, Ribbit, and BTIG.
"It's our first large fundraise, but through it we've formed a hugely valuable set of partners. I'm excited to work with them to make FTX the best company it can be. We started out as a new derivatives exchange two years ago, and this round will help us continue to build out a bigger and broader vision for what FTX could become.", Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX.
Bankman-Fried said that some of the funding will be used to build out FTX's new payments business. Earlier, in May, the firm launched FTX Pay, a service that merchants can use to accept payments in cryptocurrency and traditional currencies. Following Series B funding closing announcement, FTX’s native token FTT jumped more than 15%.