Digital asset trading platform FalconX has secured USD17 million in financing from investors including Accel, Accomplice VC, Coinbase Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Avon Ventures, a venture capital fund affiliated with FMR LLC, the parent company of Fidelity Investments. The funding will be used to introduce new products, expand FalconX’s trade execution suite and scale infrastructure to support growing institutional demand for cryptocurrency.
“We’re entering an era defined by the true digitisation of value – whether bitcoin, ethereum or new experiments such as libra, or digital yuan – much like what we saw in the early 2000s with the digitisation of information on the internet. For open, permissionless and truly global digital assets to be adopted by mainstream institutions, today’s digital financial infrastructure is grossly inadequate,” says Raghu Yarlagadda, FalconX CEO and co-founder. “FalconX is building the connective tissue, with seamless price discovery, trade execution, and value transfer. Our technology will provide the infrastructure for the future of digital assets.”
Over the last 10 months, FalconX has generated USD7 billion in global trading volume at a quarterly growth rate of over 600 per cent – driven by tight spreads, eliminating slippage and hidden fees, and maintaining enterprise-grade security. Trading as principal, FalconX has built robust liquidity through a combination of lit liquidity pools (exchanges) and proprietary dark pools. Its client base includes over 100 financial institutions across traditional finance including hedge funds, proprietary trading firms, payment gateways, over-the-counter trading desks, cryptocurrency miners, and exchanges. FalconX is expanding its regulatory footprint to continue growing its customer base across new jurisdictions and product lines.
“FalconX allows us to operate a more productive trading desk by solving for some of the major inefficiencies in the crypto markets. I have been extremely impressed with FalconX’s relentless focus on delivering value-added solutions and superior customer service,” says Brad Koeppen, Head of Trading and Business Development at CMT Digital, a proprietary trading and financial services firm, founded in 1997, with offices across US & Europe.
FalconX was founded by Raghu Yarlagadda and Prabhakar Reddy in 2018. Raghu, an engineer and entrepreneur by background, held several product leadership roles prior to FalconX, including at Google, where he was instrumental in scaling Chromebooks to a multi-billion dollar revenue business. Prabhakar, an investor, engineer and a serial entrepreneur, previously drove blockchain and enterprise SaaS investments at venture capital firm Accel. The founding team blends Silicon Valley and Wall Street, bringing experience from Google, Citadel, Goldman Sachs, Jump Trading, PayPal, Pantera Capital, WorldQuant, Kraken, and PEAK6 Investments.
“FalconX demonstrated exceptional growth with institutional counterparties through their focus on technology and reliability during volatile market conditions. They’ve proven themselves at scale without compromising on enterprise-grade security and high compliance standards – capturing a tremendous opportunity to serve the next generation of institutions looking to enter the digital asset space,” says Shekhar Kirani, General Partner at Accel.
