Luno’s parent company, DCG (Digital Currency Group), has raised $700 million in funding from some of the world’s biggest investors, including SoftBank, Google’s Capital G, and GIC, valuing the company at $10 billion.
The investment is a huge endorsement for the global crypto sector, and it provides Luno with crucial funding, as well as the expertise and backing of a syndicate of equity investors, to enable it expand into the United States.
SoftBank’s Vision Fund II and Latin American Fund led a syndicate of equity investors in acquiring more than $700 million of DCG stock from existing investors, which included Google’s Capital G, Ribbit Capital, GIC, Tribe Capital, and Emory University. The company is valued at $10 billion as a result of this transaction.
Barry Silbert, the founder and CEO of DCG, did not sell any shares in the secondary transaction.Since its inception in 2015, DCG has only raised $25 million in primary capital.
DCG has invested in over 200 blockchain companies in more than 30 countries. In 2021, DCG’s revenue will exceed $1 billion. DCG now has 30 employees at the parent company level.Across the entire organization, including their wholly-owned subsidiaries, the startup has 1,000 employees in 10 offices on 4 continents.
DCG is the parent company of several subsidiaries that have emerged as digital asset leaders including:
- Luno is a consumer-focused digital asset platform that has thrived in the emerging and frontier markets, providing digital asset education, knowledge, and investment tools to customers in Africa, Asia, and Europe. The company has grown from 2 to more than 9 million customers worldwide since 2019, and Luno is expanding to the US in 2022.
- Grayscale Investments is the world’s largest digital currency asset manager with more than $50 billion in assets under management and 15 different investments products, including the largest Bitcoin (GBTC) and Ethereum (ETHE) funds in the world.
- Genesis is a full-service digital currency prime brokerage and one of the leading institutional trading and lending firms in the world, facilitating hundreds of billions of dollars in annual trades, loans, and transactions. Recently surpassed $65 billion in loan originations and acquired a custodian in 2020. Genesis is a FINRA-registered broker-dealer and has a NY Bitlicense.
- Founded in 2019, Foundry has emerged as one of the most successful bitcoin mining and digital asset staking companies in North America. They provide equipment financing and procurement, mining advisory services, and host North America’s largest Bitcoin mining pool (Foundry USA), which is one of the fastest growing mining pools in the world. Foundry USA is consistently a top 5 global mining pool.
- CoinDesk is a premier financial media, data, index, and events company, recently pulling in more than 30 million UVs in a single month. CoinDesk also acquired TradeBlock in 2020 and today, the re-branded CoinDesk Indexes tracks more than $50 billion in AUM.
- TradeBlock is building an institutional-grade data and trading platform.
- Lastly, DCG is building a new subsidiary that will launch in 2022.
Luno and TradeBlock join CoinDesk as wholly-owned subsidiaries that were formerly DCG portfolio companies ; DCG participated in all three companies’ seed rounds years before the acquisitions. It’s a testament to their venture portfolio’s strength and success.
In addition to its venture portfolio and subsidiary companies, DCG has also expanded its investment focus:
- Long recognized as the most active digital asset seed stage investor in the world, DCG is expanding seed stage investing into new and emerging geographies
- Building a team focused on public equity investing
- Backing many more emerging fund managers as LPs
- Leading and participating in “follow on” financing rounds
- DCG will also continue to uncover opportunities through new increased investments in digital tokens and other digital assets.
- Building a credit team to grow our lending efforts to companies in the industry.
- All of these investments total several billion dollars.