Credit Suisse leads $65 million series B for Taurus's digital asset banking infrastructure

Credit Suisse has led a $65 million series B round for Geneva-based digital asset custodian and services provider Taurus (source). 

Arab Bank of Switzerland and listed real-estate group Investis, both returning from Taurus's series A round, took part in the round alongside new participants Deutsche Bank, Pictet Group, and Cedar Mundi Ventures.

The series B funding is expected to support growth objectives including recruiting additional engineers to refine the Taurus platform.

Expansion is also on the agenda with near-term plans to launch European and UAE offices, followed by further branch openings in the Americas and Southeast Asia.

Large institutional investors use custodian services to safeguard enormous quantities of crypto keys, which allow tokens to be decrypted out of storage to transact to a third party.

As these keys could be transferred outside of the blockchain used to record digital asset transactions, they're especially vulnerable to theft. The lack of an intermediary transaction party means custodians are critical to scale institutional crypto services and other DeFi products.

Taurus mainly deals with banks and other major finance firms, such as broker-dealers, working alongside more than 25 corporate clients in eight geographical markets. Its products include "ultra-secure storage" through the Taurus-PROTECT platform; token deployment and issuance services from Taurus-Capital; and Taurus T-DX, a regulated marketplace for trading tokenised securities. Some of its notable clients include Arab Bank Switzerland, CACEIS, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Pictet, Swissquote, and Vontobel.

Taurus's series A round in April 2020 raised €10 million from investors led by Arab Bank of Switzerland, 

The company was founded by Lamine Brahimi, Dr. Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Sébastien Dessimoz, and Oren-Olivier Puder. The founders remain Taurus's largest shareholders.

André Helfenstein, CEO of Credit Suisse's Switzerland subsidiary, commented: "The strategic partnership with Taurus is a cornerstone of the Swiss Bank division’s digital assets strategy with the ambition to become the leading Swiss bank in that space."

Taurus managing partner and co-founder Lamine Brahimi added: “Raising USD 65mn in the current market environment tells a lot about the quality of Taurus’ people and products.

"We are proud to welcome such high-profile investors and benefit from their expertise to further develop one of the richest platforms in the industry, covering any type of digital assets, way beyond cryptocurrencies.”