Digital Currency Group (DCG), which owns SA-linked crypto platform Luno, has raised more than $700m from a syndicate of investors including SoftBank and Capital G, the stand-alone growth fund of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
New York-based DCG, which acquired Luno in 2020 from investors that included Naspers and Rand Merchant Investment Holdings (RMI), closed a secondary funding round from a syndicate of investors led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund II and its Latin American Fund, according to an emailed statement on Tuesday. Other investors include Capital G, Ribbit Capital, GIC, Tribe Capital and Emory University, which together invested more than $700m in exchange for DCG stock held by prior investors.
DCG, which says it is now valued at $10bn, has raised only $25m in primary capital since it was formed in 2015. Founder and CEO Barry Silbert did not sell any shares as part of the secondary funding round announced on Tuesday.
Luno, which has offices in London, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Singapore, Sydney, Lagos, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, has more than 9-million customers worldwide and plans to expand into the US in 2022. The platform, which was founded by South Africans Marcus Swanepoel, Timothy Stranex, Carel van Wyk and Francois Paul, was incorporated in Singapore in 2012.
Luno has raised capital from a number of previous investors over the years starting with a seed funding round in 2014. Before its purchase by DCG in September 2020, the terms of which weren’t disclosed, it received financial backing from investors that included Naspers, RMI’s AlphaCode, Balderton Capital UK and Ventura Capital.
DCG now has about 30 employees at the parent company level, and says it will exceed $1bn in revenues in 2021. It has more than 1,000 employees across its investee companies working in 10 offices across four continents.
Besides Luno, other investments include Grayscale Investments, the world’s biggest digital currency asset manager with about $50bn in crypto assets under management; Genesis, a digital currency prime brokerage; and CoinDesk, a crypto-focused financial media, data, index and events company.
In 2019, DCG also started Foundry, which is involved in bitcoin mining and also offers advisory services, equipment and financing to crypto start-ups.
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