Check out the details below on two recent funding deals totaling $110 million.
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Unchained Capital Inc., an Austin-based Bitcoin financial services startup with a collaborative custody model for storing tokens, said April 18 it raised $60 million in series B funding. The money will be used to expand its team in Austin and remotely, and to improve upon and develop new Bitcoin-based products. The investment was led by Valor Equity Partners. Existing investors NYDIG, Trammell Venture Partners, Ecliptic Capital and Highland Capital Partners also joined the round.
The startup, founded in 2016, currently has 81 full-time employees. About 35 of them are based in Austin, where the company has its headquarters in the Littlefield Building at Sixth Street and Congress Avenue.
While last year's cryptocurrency upheaval has depressed currency values and sank multiple companies, in the fourth quarter Unchained saw a record number of new clients, co-founder and CEO Joe Kelly said.
"That was really the result of a lot of people seeing these models failing and understanding, as they're escaping them or fleeing them, or they want to do something with their assets that just feels safer and more robust ... that Unchained as a model was the right choice," he said. "So there's been a lot of proof there."
A startup based in Austin and San Diego thinks it might have one of the best solutions out there to combat ransomware attacks. Halcyon Tech Inc. calls itself the world's first cyber resilience platform specifically targeting ransomware before its initial intrusion, using artificial intelligence and exploiting ransomware features. For example, it tricks ransomware into aborting or revealing an attack by exploiting features in the ransomware itself.
Halcyon said April 20 it closed a $50 million series A funding round led by SYN Ventures, with additional investment from Dell Technologies Capital and Corner Ventures.
A company representative told Inno that about 20% of Halcyon's workforce is based in Austin, including co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Ryan Smith, a former Cylance Inc. vice president of research and adviser. The company said it chose Austin for its HQ because it's a standout technical innovation hub with a lot of engineering talent.
"When setting out to build Halcyon, we started with the premise that all cybersecurity solutions are inevitably bypassed," co-founder and CEO Jon Miller stated. "We engineered Halcyon to embrace failure as a core concept of protection. Stopping ransomware requires multiple prevention and detection techniques, all trained extensively on years of actual ransomware attacks. This funding positions us to rapidly scale our mission of making ransomware unprofitable and enable resilient enterprises around the world."
For more local deals, check out another recent funding wrap. And subscribe to Austin Business Journal for startup resources such as lists of venture capital and private equity firms, incubators and accelerators, angel investors and coworking providers.
