DFNS raises $16 million in Series A

In the world of digital asset preservation, there are a few giants such as Ledger and Fireblocks, but DFNS is gradually making its mark.

Boosted by good momentum in 2024, especially towards the end of the year as markets rose, the start-up based between Paris and New York has just raised $16 million (€15.5 million) in a Series A.

This deal was led by Further Ventures, which is a private equity fund based in Abu Dhabi. Other historical investors, such as White Star Capital, Hashed, Semantic, Techstars and Bpifrance also participated in the round.

The valuation of DFNS, which had already raised €13 million ($12 million) in 2022, is not public.

"This deal validates both our product and our focus on fintechs and financial players," explains Clarisse Hagège, co-founder and CEO of DFNS, which claims more than 130 customers including Fidelity, Zodia Custody (Standard Chartered's crypto subsidiary) and Stripe, which has just acquired Bridge.

Launched in 2020, DFNS has developed a wallet creation solution based on MPC (Multi-Party Computation) technology. This MPC technology breaks down the access keys to the digital wallet into fragments; these are then distributed across different secure universes.

Today, the leader in this MPC market is the American Fireblocks, which has raised more than a billion dollars from all its fundraising. By contrast, France's Ledger is the world leader in the self-custody segment, meaning that customers themselves are the sole managers of Ledger's technology.

The strengths of DFNS?

DFNS has managed to carve out a niche between the major players in the sector thanks to two things.

Firstly, modularity. Thanks to the API system, the 25-strong start-up allows developers to take bricks and create, in partnership with DFNS, their own wallet system according to their needs.

"We allow our customers to deploy their own instances on public clouds like AWS, private clouds, and connect their Thales or IBM HSMs to our blockchain transaction management system," explains Clarisse Hagège (read our report on the future of wallets).

Then there's the price. While not all offers are the same, DFNS has managed to come out on top, thanks in particular to a billing system based on usage and not on volumes under management. "DFNS is clearly one of the cheapest players on the market", confirms one company, which is not even a client of theirs.

With this fundraising, DFNS wants to recruit a few more tech profiles and accelerate its development with financial institutions in a context where the arrival of players like BlackRock has put a serious boost on adoption.