Bitcoin Hardware Wallet Company Ledger Raises $7 Million in Series A Round

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by Polina Chernykh · 3 min read
Bitcoin Hardware Wallet Company Ledger Raises $7 Million in Series A Round
The Ledger Blue is the latest generation product from Ledger, result of more than two years of research and development. This high-end device embeds a large touchscreen to securely manage transactions and complex smart contracts. Its slick yet robust casing encloses the best-in-class technology built upon the Blockchain Open Ledger (BOLOS) platform, a powerful and flexible operating system. Photo: Ledger SAS

The France-based blockchain startup is closing its new funding round, which is one of the largest investments in a European blockchain startup so far.

Ledger has completed a $7 million Series A fundraising round, led by MAIF Avenir, a corporate venture arm of insurance group MAIF. Other investors include Wicklow Capital, Digital Currency Group, Xange, GDTRE, The Whittemore Collection, Libertus Capital, BHB Network, Kima Ventures, and Nicolas Pinto.

“By investing in Ledger, MAIF intends to contribute to the development of the Blockchain ecosystem, a new source of confidence to record transactions, based on peer-to-peer exchanges,” said Jean-Marc Willmann, Deputy General Director at MAIF. “MAIF is proud to support Ledger into its objective to become the world leader in distributed trust.”

The latest investment brings the company’s total funding to $8.5 million. In 2015, Ledger raised $1.5 million in seed round from XAnge Capital, Hi-Pay, Thibaut Faurès Fustel de Coulanges, Alain Tingaud Innovations, Pascal Gauthier, and others.

Ledger is a provider of security solutions that allow bitcoin users to protect and control their digital currency private keys. The startup produces tiny bitcoin hardware wallets, embedded solutions for connected objects, and embedded solutions for connected items.

The company’s products allow users to easily protect their bitcoins without any security knowledge. Running tasks on your device is more secure than using an app on your smartphone, as nobody can access the cyrptocurrency private keys on the device.

Ledger’s flagship products are the Ledger Blue and Ledger Nano S, hardware wallets for cryptocurrencies and digital identities. The startup has already sold over 50,000 wallets in 130 countries.

According to Ledger, it will use the money to expand its presence in the enterprise market and enlarge its marketing, sales, engineering, and support teams by hiring 20 new collaborators. This will speed up the launch of new enterprise security products for digital currencies, thus opening new revenue sources.

“Ledger has seen a tremendous growth in the last months, and we are on track to increase tenfold our revenues this year,” said Eric Larchevêque, CEO of Ledger.

“Our primary objective is to reinforce our position as a global market leader on hardware wallet products, while we accelerate the development of enterprise cryptocurrency solutions through the signature of soon to be announced strategic partnership agreements. We are also actively pursuing research & development on hardware oracle technology with key industrial customers for smart grid, supply chain and insurance blockchain use cases.”

Besides, the startup is going to launch a new enterprise grade cryptocurrency solution later this year.

“Ledger introduces an enterprise grade cold storage solution based on HSM (Hardware Security Module) and hardware authenticators. It is a turnkey SaaS hardware/software suite enabling multi-currency, multi-signature, rate limiting and time locking. The solution is fully trustless, with emergency recovery procedures available even in the case of force majeure”, Ledger said.

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