Cryptocurrency wallet provider ZenGo received $20 million from a Series A funding round led by growth equity fund Insight Partners. Other funders include Distributed Global and Austin Rief Ventures, among others.
“The funds will be used to grow the user base, invest in more assets/chains, financial services and options including our payment Visa card, and grow the team from 20 to 40,” said ZenGo CEO Ouriel Ohayon in a message.
With ZenGo, users can send, receive, buy, sell, trade, earn and soon pay with over 50 cryptocurrencies in 180 markets, according to the company.
The investment comes less than a year after the wallet launched on iOS and Android in early 2020. According to the Tel Aviv-based company, ZenGo grew to 100,000 customers and $100 million in transaction volume in 2020. In 2021 alone, as bitcoin rocketed to new all-time highs, ZenGo added an additional 100K customers and $100M in transactions. ZenGo revenues grew twenty-fold in 2020, the company said.
“What excites us most about ZenGo is the team,” said Jeff Horing, co-founder and managing director at Insight Partners, in a statement.
“They understand the latest developments across the ecosystem and push the limits of threshold cryptography and Multiparty Computation. As new protocols mature, the team has innovated with products that enhance the user experience.”
Multi-party computation (MPC) breaks up long cryptographic keys. According to ZenGo, that saves customers from having to write down private keys or remember passwords, and protects them even if their phone is lost or stolen, according to the company. Instead, the wallet relies on facial biometrics to allow user access.
More generally, it allows for large pools of data to stay encrypted while permitting information to be extracted from those data pools using encrypted computations.
“We believe that a true crypto-based future will require solutions that are radically simple, mobile-first, and built on-chain”, said Ohayon in a statement. “Our approach to security, based on MPC, eliminates traditional single points of failure, and has helped us build an innovative consumer-grade wallet that makes crypto simpler, and also an order of magnitude safer.”
The company pitches itself as a “third generation” keyless wallet built on MPC, thereby removing private keys and single secrets out of the security equation.