By
Teuta Franjkovic
December 12th, 2019
Germany-based Upvest will use the funding for not only expanding its reach but also for its API easier integration.
Upvest has successfully raised €7 million (about $7.8 million) in a recently concluded Series A funding round. The startup is based in Germany and is focused on tokenizing financial assets on a blockchain for companies who need to.
According to a report from The Block, the startup plans to use the funds it just raised to accommodate the expansion of its blockchain API (application programming interface) so that the platform can do more tokenization for more kinds of companies including private equity and real estate. The funding round was led by Notion Capital, a venture capital firm based in London, as well as Holtzbrinck Ventures and Partech Ventures.
Upvest founder and CEO Martin Kassing has said that a lot of attention is placed on the company’s APIs to make this tokenization easy, attracting more entrants into the fintech space. Kassing said:
“Our easy usable APIs foster the adoption of decentralized ledgers and create a more inclusive financial ecosystem.”
This much dedication and attention has helped the startup process €50 million (about $55.6 million) since it launched. The firm also boasts of serving clients around the world, from more than 80 countries.
Holtzbrinck Ventures partner Jan Miczaika has spoken on the company’s decision to fund Upvest and what was impressive about the startup:
“We were impressed by Upvest’s drive to find a real-world and repeatable use case for the blockchain. It is one of the few companies in the space that has real revenues and a clear ROI (return on investment) for its customers.”
Per an Upvest blog post, the company says it has realized that the major problem facing the finance sector all over the world, is that there are too many limitations to growth with existing traditional finance solutions. The result is that fintech investments that still use old methods incur heavy costs for distribution, issuance, and storage, making their services expensive.
The solution to this, Upvest says, is the immediate upgrade of all fintechs to new infrastructure bringing ease to the whole process and ensuring that everything from the tokenization to access, ownership, and control is as seamless as possible. With blockchain technology, storing these alternative digital investments are much cheaper as fintech establishments are poised to save 85% more than traditional service providers.
Notion Capital General Partner Patrick Norris has said that blockchain will be the obvious choice for finance and Upvest is on the right track. He noted:
“We expect the Blockchain to be extremely disruptive to the financial services industry. Upvest’s blockchain agnostic platform for Asset Tokenization puts it in an extremely strong position to be the enterprise-grade platform of choice for the new generation of financial services companies.”
Based in Germany’s capital city of Berlin, Upvest was founded in 2018 by Martin Kassing and Jesper Noehr and has so far garnered a team of 20 employees.
