ConsenSys Raises US$450 Million Series D From Temasek, SoftBank and Microsoft
by Fintech News Hong Kong March 16, 2022Global blockchain software company ConsenSys announced the close of a US$450 million Series D financing round, bringing its valuation to over US$7 billion.
ParaFi Capital led this raise after participating in ConsenSys’ Series C round in November 2021.
New investors participating in the round includes Temasek, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Microsoft, Anthos Capital, Sound Ventures, and C Ventures.
ConsenSys’ Series C investors — Third Point, Marshall Wace, TRUE Capital Management, and UTA VC, United Talent Agency’s venture fund — also participated in this round.
The funding will support the rapid expansion of ConsenSys’ Ethereum-based MetaMask wallet with a major redesign scheduled for release later in 2022, as well as the roll out of a plug-in extensibility system that will allow integration with a wide variety of blockchain protocols and account security schemes.
MetaMask now supports more than 30 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs), growing 42% in four months with the United States, the Philippines, Brazil, Germany and Nigeria representing some of its most active markets.
ConsenSys will also accelerate the global adoption of Infura ’s development tool suite as well as its efforts to drive NFT adoption for artists, content creators, brands, intellectual property owners, game publishers, and sports leagues.
With nearly 700 full time employees at present, ConsenSys’ hiring will surge this year as it is on track to scale to over 1,000 employees by the end of 2022.
All proceeds from the round will be converted to ETH to rebalance the ETH to USD-equivalents ratio in line with ConsenSys’ treasury strategy.
Joseph Lubin
Joseph Lubin, Founder and CEO of ConsenSys said,
“I think of ConsenSys as a broad and deep capabilities machine for the decentralized protocols ecosystem, able to rapidly capitalize at scale on fundamental new constructs that emerge, such as developer tooling, tokenization, token launches, wallets, security audits, DeFi (1.0, 2.0 and beyond), NFTs, bridges, Layer-2 scaling, DAOs, and more.
This view has resonated with our crypto native and growth investors in a Series D that will enable us to execute powerful growth strategies. This round takes in digital assets as well as fiat and converts immediately to ETH. Next round will be our ‘Series ETH’ where we will assist investors in getting fully crypto native and contributing ETH as a symbol of and commitment to the ongoing paradigm shift.”
