Private markets digital platform has achieved USD4 billion-plus in assets and deals in a year as it continues rapid growth which has seen more than 70 financial institutions across Europe, North America, the Middle East, South America and Africa using its technology in 2021.
VALK, which is backed by venture capital funds and strategic financial investors R3, SIX Group, Ascension Ventures and Metavallon, has seen growth of 2,500 per cent in just nine months, having only celebrated hitting USD1 billion in deals in M&A and fund-raising activity just five months ago.
The London-based company enables clients including investment banks, hedge funds, family offices, fund managers and asset managers to digitise processes and assets to become more profitable and target new opportunities through secondary trading and access to exchanges
Its technology replaces slow manual processes in private markets with an end-to-end digital transaction and tokenisation platform which allows users to highlight opportunities to clients by delivering all the deal processes on one platform.
The platform, which is built on the Corda and Ethereum blockchain standards, boosts liquidity as it enables an easily implemented secondary market while supporting users to share deals and assets with other members of the VALK network. Clients can share opportunities or investor pools and also connect to any digital exchanges on the Corda and Ethereum framework.
Clients set up secure private portals in just a few clicks where they store and outline deals and assets in an investor-friendly manner and can instantly tokenise all uploaded assets.
Antoine Loth of VALK says: “Growth this year has accelerated across private markets as more financial institutions recognise the value and efficiency that can be delivered by moving to digital solutions as well as the opportunities for new revenues from secondary market transactions.
“The past nine months has seen phenomenal growth, but the private markets sector is worth more than USD100 trillion and there is a lot of work to do as well as other markets to address where our technology could play an important role.”
VALK’s rapid growth and success has been recognised by inclusion in the Financial Conduct Authority regulatory sandbox and Fintech 4.0, the fourth group of fintech companies selected for the Fintech growth programme run by Tech Nation.
The brainchild of founders Antoine Loth and Elie Azzi, VALK, which launched in 2019, aims to make global private markets digital and connected by offering a seamless end-to-end solution which improves processes and transforms how private transactions are conducted.
Its white-labelled solution is delivered to clients very quickly by VALK and can then be customised by the client. They can create any type of deal in a few clicks, set up deal pages and ultra-secure enterprise grade data rooms and upload legal documentation as well as instantly tokenise all of their assets that are uploaded.
The platform helps clients to keep up to date with investor activity while providing them with compliant and accurate live reporting on the performance of assets and holdings.
VALK has won Best Distributed Ledger Technology Project at the 2021 Sell-Side Technology Awards 2021 and was highly commended as Technology Provider of the Year at the 2021 Asset Management Awards. It has also been nominated for the FStech Awards.
“We are getting a lot of requests from clients and the market for even more innovative solutions on the digital asset and DeFi side so don’t be surprised if you hear from us soon with new product offerings that cater to that fast growing and complementary industry,” says Elie Azzi.
