Institutional investor crypto trading platform SheeldMarket raises $10 million

Parisian digital asset trading platform for institutional investors, SheeldMarket has raised $10 million in a Series A round. No longer the darling of retail investors, the volume of institutional trading rose from $18 billion to $57 billion in 2020 alone, and the new funding for SheeldMarket will be used to scale its prime broker services and push into new product areas, with the ultimate goal of getting more and more of these investors through the door. To date, the company has raised $11 million.

Founded in 2019 by Arnaud Carrere, Oliver Yates, and Simon Douyer, SheeldMarket has stepped in where major firms haven’t, namely offering institutional investors access to crypto trading. Now, it’s not that these investment houses don’t realise and recognise what’s happening, it’s a limited existing infrastructure that’s unable/unequipped to manage currencies between banks, exchanges, custodians, and over-the-counter (OTC) providers. This lack of infrastructure then creates unnecessary friction in the trading process, ultimately exposing traders to risks. Needless to say, something even the less-than-sterling houses would rather avoid.

SheeldMarket, on the other hand, has been built from the ground up to provide a holistic overview of multiple exchanges and OTC’s and allows customers to trade anywhere via depositing funds directly on the platform.

An EU-registered broker, SheeldMarket removes the tangled maze of rules and regulations for investors and ensures that available trades are, in fact, available, thereby never needlessly exposing investment capital.

As a stamp of approval, SheeldMarket’s Series A round was led by industry titan Atomico, and saw participation from Semantic, with angel investors Pascal Gauthier (CEO of Ledger) and Alexis Bonillo (co-founder of Zenly) and all existing investors following on. As part of the deal, Atomico Partner Siraj Khaliq will join SheeldMarket’s board.

“This year, Goldman Sachs and Blackrock each declared Bitcoin an official asset class. Traditional consumer payment companies like Paypal and Mastercard entered the fray by adding crypto payments to their networks,” said Khaliq. “The snowball effect among institutional players is fast continuing, luckily SheeldMarket is perfectly positioned to help them build out and manage their digital asset strategies.”