S&P Global Leads Kaiko's Series B Extension to $110 Million

S&P Global led an extension of Kaiko's Series B to $110 million, the French crypto data firm said on Monday. Ten other institutions came in with it, among them Nasdaq Ventures, BNP Paribas, Royal Bank of Canada and Coinbase Ventures. No valuation was given. Kaiko sells price data and indices covering more than 150 exchanges and protocols, and the money goes to that business and to a newer one aimed at tokenized markets. The investors also take seats on a working group the company will chair.

Eleven names on one line

The list is the story here. Alongside S&P Global came BNP Paribas, Bpifrance, Broadridge, the Canton Foundation, Coinbase Ventures, DRW Venture Capital, Nasdaq Ventures, Royal Bank of Canada, Stellar and Susquehanna Private Equity Investments. Existing shareholders Anthemis, Point Nine and Revaia took part as well. Four accounts print that roster identically, which is what happens when everyone works from the same release. Kaiko's chief executive described the group in terms of what its members do for a living.

The new investors "span several key areas of digital asset markets, including pricing, trading, capital allocation and blockchain development," Ambre Soubiran said.

The Business Wire copy carries a shorter version of the same sentence, in which she calls the group partners and not only shareholders. Cathy Clay, who runs S&P Dow Jones Indices, said in the release that her firm is investing for the future as digital assets accelerate.

Two dates for the same round

This is an extension bolted onto a Series B that closed years ago, and the accounts do not agree on when. The Block dates the original $53 million round to June 2022. CoinDesk says it was announced in May 2022, at the same figure. Neither explains the other and the release settles nothing. CoinDesk alone reports a $24 million Series A in June 2021 led by Anthemis and Underscore VC, which has one source in this sweep and no corroboration in the rest of it.

What Kaiko did with the intervening years is easier to pin down. It bought Cometh, a DeFi infrastructure provider approved by France's AMF as a crypto-asset service provider under MiCA, and Amberdata, a US digital-asset data firm. Cointelegraph dates the two deals to May and June of this year, and it is the only account in this sweep that dates them at all. Prices were not disclosed for either.

What the money is for

Two things, by the company's account. The first is the existing data business, meaning feeds, analytics and the S&P Kaiko Digital Asset Indices built with S&P Dow Jones Indices. The second is infrastructure for what the release calls onchain capital markets, and the products named under that heading are data services for tokenized Treasury bills, money-market funds, equities and bonds. Kaiko holds SOC 1 and SOC 2 Type 2 attestations, the audit reports a bank asks a vendor for before it plugs anything into a risk system, and its index arm is authorised under the EU Benchmarks Regulation. Regulated status is the part of this that a data vendor cannot improvise.

The institutions in the round also formed a Strategic Industry Working Group, chaired by Kaiko, with a say in how tokenized-market data infrastructure gets built. No membership rules, output or timetable was published for it.

What nobody put a number on

Revenue, headcount and client counts are absent from every account in this sweep, and so is the valuation. Kaiko was founded in 2014 and is based in Paris. Its lead investor is also its index partner. Nasdaq has been writing cheques of this kind for a while, having put $100 million into Kraken's parent, and SBI led a $76 million round for EDX Markets on much the same reasoning. Whether the working group produces a standard or a set of meetings is the question the release does not answer. Kaiko has not said when it will report on either.