Anchorage Raises $40m in a Series B Round, led by Visa and Blockchain Capital

According to an announcement on Wednesday, the cryptocurrency custody provider for investors – Anchorage – raised $40 million in a Series B funding round. This round was backed by venture company Blockchain Capital and Visa with support from investors such as the American venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz, also known as a16z.

This connection between Visa, Anchorage and Andreesen Horowitz is not something new as they are all validator nodes for Libra – Facebook’s upcoming cryptocurrency. Yet again, according to Anchorage, this is not the reason for Visa’s investment.

As Anchorage noted, the investment’s aim is to support “all digital assets and crypto-native features,” in addition to integrating custody services with other offerings, staking and on-chain governance, and further investment in auditing and compliance measures.

Some of the “major pain points” for institutional investors, wanting to include digital assets to their portfolios, are tax preparation, accounting and auditing – solving these problems will boost adoption.

President and Co-Founder of Anchorage, Diogo Monica stated:

“Our mission at Anchorage is to advance institutional participation in the digital asset class, and this funding will improve our ability to do precisely that.”

Anchorage claims to provide a “smart storage” service that is better than “cold storage” and “hot wallets” solutions, after a long silent period earlier this year. They’ve implemented a “custom logic” in their hardware security module, which handles a specific transaction with the help of multiple layers of biometric authentication. This way, users will use their keys for transactions, staking, audits and voting “in real time and without ever being removed from safe storage.”

Anchorage’s overall funding increased to $57 million with the last investment round. The Series A round raised $17 million and was led by Andreesen Horowitz and included other names such as SciFi VC, a company by PayPal Co-Founder Max Levchin, Knosla Ventures and AngelList Co-Founder Naval Ravikant.