Blockchain Finance Startup Clearmatics Raises $12 Million in New Funding

Blockchain finance firm Clearmatics Technologies has raised over $12 million in a Series A funding round led by venture capital firm Route 66 Ventures.

Additional investment in the funding round came from private equity firm TNF Capital and XTX Ventures, the venture capital arm of electronic market-making firm XTX Markets.

As part of the arrangement, Samir Khosla, a managing partner at TNF Capital, will join Clearmatics' board of directors.

Khosla said his company was pleased to deepen its commitment to Clearmatics and praised "its exceptional team under the leadership of Robert Sams, a visionary innovator, bringing transformative change to financial market infrastructure."

Founded in 2015, Clearmatics has adapted the ethereum blockchain to build "Decentralised Clearing Networks",  which are private, member-owned networks designed to automate the lifecycle of financial derivative contracts without the need for third parties. The firm notably boasts ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin as an adviser.

Back in May of this year, the firm teamed up with Axoni for a milestone demonstration of how a financial derivative could instigate a cross-chain atomic transfer of value between two distinct networks. It represented the first time a derivatives contract had been originated on one enterprise blockchain and settled on another.

Elsewhere, Clearmatics is the technology provider to the Utility Settlement Coin Project (USC), a consortium of 17 banks and financial institutions creating a new digital cash instrument collateralized by central bank money.

That effort was the focus of some recent jockeying by fellow enterprise-focused startup R3. As reported by CoinDesk last month, R3 tried unsuccessfully to muscle in on the USC project, proposing that it be built on the Corda platform. However, the idea was unanimously rejected by the 17 consortium members when put to a vote.

With the latest funding, Clearmatics said it plans to expand its team (currently there over 30 staff between its headquarters in London and Silicon Valley) and also launch a Protocol Provider service next year to support the go-to-market of the USC project.

"We are very excited to be working with investors who are so committed to disrupting legacy market structure through technology," Clearmatics CEO Robert Sams said in a statement.

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