When Zabo landed its Seed round last year, its co-founder Alex Treece said the cryptocurrency API startup planned to expand to include every crypto asset, account and wallet.
Now, the Dallas-based company is on its way to doing that after being acquired by public firm Coinbase – one of the largest crypto exchanges in the country by trading volume.
“It's a huge milestone for us as a team and validation of what we've been working on for the past few years,” Treece said via email.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Treece also declined to say if Zabo will continue to operate as an independent entity. However, since Coinbase is a fully remote company with no physical headquarters, Zabo’s leadership will remain in DFW.
Treece said the deal came about through relationships Zabo’s leadership has had with members of the Coinbase team for years. He said the two companies’ similar missions and cultures made the move a natural fit. While not disclosing plans, Treece and Co-founder Christopher Brown hinted at making cryptocurrencies and web 3.0 technology more mainstream.
Zabo, which has developed an API to connect financial services companies to their customers’ cryptocurrency wallets, was launched in 2018. That year, it landed a $1 million pre-seed round from Blockchain Ventures. Last year, it followed that up with a $2.5 million Seed round led by Austin’s Moonshots Capital in one of the firm’s first blockchain-related investments.
“Even with incredible growth, the crypto market was fragmented. Fintech and traditional financial institutions were spending massive engineering resources to build from the ground up, and consumer exchange accounts, wallets and protocols were disconnected. That’s where Zabo came in,” said Craig Cummings, co-founder and general partner at Moonshots, wrote in a Medium post.
Coinbase was formed in 2012 and has grown into a global giant, reporting more than $1 billion in revenue last year. In April, the company went public with a direct listing on the Nasdaq. It has a current market cap of nearly $51 billion.
According to Crunchbase, Zabo joins more than 15 other companies acquired by Coinbase, including blockchain analyzing and tracking firm Neutrino, fellow API software startup Blockspring and, recently, London financial infrastructure firm skew.
North Texas is home to several innovators in the blockchain space. Hedera Hashgraph, which has raised more than $100 million in funding, and industry organization the Texas Blockchain Council are located in Richardson. Dallas hosts several other industry adjacent companies, like alternative investment firm Plutus21 Capital, which has around $60 million under its management, and Applied Blockchain, a crypto mining firm that has raised close to $60 million with a recent $35.2 million private stock deal led by Bitmain.
“It's still early, and crypto is still young as an industry. You don't create a new, trillion-dollar asset class from nothing without volatility,” Treece said. “This space is about a lot more than just asset prices - it's also about building next-generation financial infrastructure. We believe crypto will positively impact billions of people's lives.”
