Blockchain startup Chainalysis raises $16M in Series A round

Friday, April 6, 2018 10:11 AM UTC

New York-based blockchain startup Chainalysis has announced that it has raised $16 million in Series A funding round led by Benchmark.

The latest funding round follows a seed round in 2016 in which the startup secured $1.6 million, bringing the total funding till date to $17.6 million. Sarah Tavel, a general partner at Benchmark, will be joining Chainalysis’ board.

Excited to be partnering with @chainalysis to help enable the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Michael, Jonathan, and Jan are the type of founders you love to partner with: relentless, collaborative, heat-seeking missiles. https://t.co/4bOYmzQV4D
— Sarah Tavel (@sarahtavel) April 5, 2018

Alongside the series A round, Chainalysis announced a new product – Chainalysis KYT (Know Your Transaction).

“Chainalysis KYT provides real-time feedback on the underlying purpose of transactions and feeds that feedback into exchanges’ transaction processing engines. Compliance personnel use our dashboard to generate alerts on risky customers and export suspicious activity reports,” Chainalysis said.

The company said that it rolled out KYT to a small group of early customers, adding that “they have already seen a 20x improvement in the speed of account reviews.”

Furthermore, Chainalysis revealed plans to introduce multi-currency support this year. It is launching Bitcoin Cash as part of its investigation software Reactor and plans to expand to at least 10 cryptocurrencies by the end of 2018.

“Both Reactor and Chainalysis KYT will feature all the cryptocurrencies that we support this year,” it added.

Founded in 2014, Chainalysis offers tools to analyse bitcoin transactions on the blockchain. Its software detects suspicious activity in real-time and provides investigation tools for law enforcement to tackle cybercrime.