Crypto asset management platform Cobo bags $40M Series B

Cobo, a Singapore-based crypto asset management platform, raised a $40 million Series B to accelerate the development of decentralized finance as a service (DFaaS).

The round was co-led by DST Global, A&T Capital and IMO Ventures.

The company will use its proceeds for the development of DeFi as a service (DFaaS) infrastructure and its existing custody services such as wallet as a service (WaaS), trading and staking as a service (StaaS). The funding will also be used to apply for regulatory licenses to ensure strict compliance to the relevant anti-money laundering (AML) and counter the financing of terrorism (CFT) requirements.

Amid the growing interest for cryptocurrencies among Asian investors, institutional investors and retail investors are seeking diversification options to hedge against inflation and other risks, the company said in its statement.

“With interest in the crypto revolution soaring across Asia, it’s high time to expand blockchain infrastructures to meet the rising demand, especially as we’re seeing growing enthusiasm among institutions,” said the company CEO and co-founder Discus Fish, also known as Shixing Mao. “In the past, we’d witness crypto applications evolve from Bitcoin to DeFi and now NFTs … Ultimately, this fundraising takes us another step closer to Cobo’s foundational vision of empowering 1 billion users to access crypto.”

Cobo was founded in 2017 with a mission to bridge the gap between crypto and users, both retail and institutional, for increasing access to blockchain for all. Cobo’s founders are CEO Discus Fish, the co-founder of F2Pool, and CTO Changhao Jiang, a former platform engineer at Facebook and Google who co-founded Chinese encrypted digital wallet Bihang.

“As blockchain technology and innovation advances, we are observing a wave of increasing institutional demand,” said Jasmine Zhang, partner of A&T Capital.

DeFi typically requires professional managers including fund managers or C-level executives to interact directly with cryptocurrency lending protocols like Curve, Compound, Uniswap and AAVE, the company CEO said. Unlike those existing DeFi platforms, Cobo’s DeFi as a service (DFaaS) allows the institutional investor users to empower staff, even computerized bots, to perform operations of various risks, the company CEO told TechCrunch. Low-risk operations can be automated by bots, whereas high-risk operations such as moving large sums still require multisignature confirmations by managers and/or CXOs, he added.

Cobo’s DFaaS infrastructure underpins its multisignature crypto wallet platform and crypto asset custodial services for retail and institutional investors, respectively. Cobo has served more than 300 institutional clients, including Deribit, F2Pool, BitMart and Pionex through its custody services such as Cobo Custody and DFaaS with a cumulative transaction volume of $20 billion. Its retail investor clients use Cobo Wallet.

Cobo, which also has offices in Hong Kong and Seattle, raised a $13 million Series A round in October 2018 to enter new international markets.

Cobo supports more than 50 public chains, over 1,000 tokens and serves a total of 75,000 high-net-worth individuals, the company CEO said.