Kaiko raises $53M to grow its crypto data platform

Kaiko, a French startup that provides market intelligence about digital assets, has raised $53 million in funding.

S&P Global led the investment. Kaiko stated in its announcement of the deal today that Nasdaq Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, BNP Paribas and several other institutional backers chipped in as well. The deal extends a $57 million Series B round that the company originally closed in 2022.

Kaiko, officially Challenger Deep SAS, provides market data about more than 20,000 digital assets. It collects the information from blockchain logs, crypto exchanges and lending protocols, decentralized systems that allow users to issue loans to one another. Kaiko sells its data to financial institutions through a set of cloud services.

Customers who require access to market data in near real-time can turn to a service called Kaiko Stream. It’s based on gRPC, an open-source standard for building application programming interfaces. The technology is several times faster than the REST standard on which most APIs are based but can also be more complicated to use.

The company also offers access to historical market datasets. Customers can download them twice a day as a spreadsheet or have the company sync the records to their cloud-based data warehouses.

Kaiko offers raw data points such as cryptocurrency prices alongside information derived from market analyses. For example, a metric called implied volatility helps investors estimate future fluctuations in digital asset prices. Advanced users can customize how Kaiko calculates risk levels by adjusting its evaluation criteria.

The latest addition to the its portfolio of data products made its debut earlier this month. The S&P Kaiko Digital Asset Indices suite of services enables fund managers to track the current price of the cryptocurrencies in which they invest. Asset prices are refreshed every few seconds. Kaiko is bringing the offering to market with S&P, the lead investor in its new funding round.

The company will use the funds to expand its datasets. It also plans to upgrade its Kaiko Data Infrastructure platform, which enables organizations to share financial information with partners via blockchains. If a dataset is already stored on a blockchain, the platform can load it into traditional analytics tools.

The cash infusion gives Kaiko the option to make more acquisitions. In June, it bought Amberdata Inc., a venture-backed startup that built a competing market intelligence platform for crypto investors. Kaiko earlier acquired Cometh SAS, a Paris-based developer of digital asset management tools for financial institutions. 

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