French platform Flowdesk rakes in $30 million to drive financial services for cryptocurrencies

Paris-based crypto-asset trading platform Flowdesk has raised $30 million in funding to drive the growth of financial services for cryptocurrencies. The round saw the participation of Eurazeo, Aglaé Ventures, ISAI, Speedinvest, Fabric, Ledger, and Coinbase, and 20 angel investors, including Alexandre Prot (Qonto), Nicolas Julia (Sorare), Pascal Gauthier (Ledger) and Sébastien Borget (The Sandbox).

Founded in 2020 by Guilhem Chaumont, Paul Bugnot, François Cluzeau and Balthazar Giraux, the startup has developed an infrastructure that allows cryptocurrencies to interconnect and trade on various exchanges while guaranteeing the redundancy and scalability needed to support the growing number of crypto projects. The company offers four services, including asset management, brokerage, custody and market-making.

Currently, the French digital asset service provider allows interconnection with more than 60 cryptocurrency exchange platforms. Flowdesk recently opened offices in Singapore in March 2022 and now plans to open an office in the U.S. with the new funding.

Guilhem Chaumont, co-founder and CEO of Flowdesk: “This fundraising will allow us to accelerate our operations to meet the growing demand in Europe, Asia and North America. It will also give us the means to develop our technological infrastructure to meet the new needs that will emerge in market making. Our vision is that within 10 years a large proportion of assets will be tokenised using blockchain technology, which will require a rethinking of financial services with a more scalable and counterparty agnostic approach. We will have to scale up quickly to integrate this new financial situation.”

Thomas Turelier, vice president at Eurazeo: “An increasing number of companies are issuing tokens and are thus confronted with the complexity of managing a liquid asset in different markets. Most of these companies do not, however, see themselves as financial market professionals - they are technology providers, game developers, and so on. Financial infrastructure is crucial to allow all these web3 players to develop with the least possible friction while trusting a regulated player aligned with its customers in terms of financial interests.”