New strategic investors including banks will enable Ripple to accelerate customer adoption
SAN FRANCISCO - Ripple, the global provider of financial settlement solutions, announced today that it has completed a $55 million Series B financing. The company will use the funds to accelerate its rapid customer growth, pursue strategic partnerships and grow the team internationally.
The financing includes participation from new investors including Standard Chartered, Accenture Ventures, SCB Digital Ventures, the venture arm of Siam Commercial Bank, and SBI Holdings. Additional investors participating in the round include Santander Innoventures, the venture arms of CME Group and Seagate Technology, and Venture 51. The addition of notable strategic investors in this round, especially banks who are backing Ripple following hands-on experience with its solutions, provides the company with new counsel and expertise to better serve its growing customer base around the world.
“Our mission is to make cross-border payments truly efficient for banks and their customers, and in doing so, lay the foundation for an Internet of Value where the world moves money as easily as information,” said Ripple CEO & co-founder Chris Larsen, "We're thrilled to have these world-class investors joining forces with us to help make this vision a reality."
Existing Ripple investors include GV (Google Ventures), Andreessen Horowitz, IDG Capital Partners, and Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures. Ripple has received a total of over $93 million in funding.
As the only provider of enterprise blockchain solutions, Ripple’s growing, global network includes 15 of the top 50 global banks, 10 banks in commercial deal phases and over 30 bank pilots completed, among many others also using Ripple’s solutions. Today Ripple also announced the addition of several new banks to its growing global network.
Many of the investors commented about their decision to back Ripple and its distributed financial technology:
“This investment is part of our commitment to the bank’s digitization agenda. Ripple is one of the most advanced distributed financial technology companies in the industry with a tested and viable solution,” said Alex Manson, Global Head, Transaction Banking, Standard Chartered. “Leveraging Ripple’s deep expertise in technology, financial services and compliance, we can co-develop more use cases to better serve our clients and their ecosystems' needs in an evolving marketplace.”
“Accenture has worked alongside Ripple for some time now, helping our banking clients understand and implement distributed financial technology,” said Richard Lumb, group chief executive—Financial Services at Accenture. “But the benefits of DFT could go further, with real-time reporting capabilities and fraud detection for example, having disruptive applications across industries. As such, and in addition to this investment by Accenture Ventures, we have formed an alliance with Ripple to investigate new ways to help clients use their technology, leveraging Accenture’s deep industry expertise.”
“Siam Commercial Bank is excited to take a pioneering role in investing and piloting money transfers through Ripple’s network. Our participation makes SCB the first Thai commercial bank to move forward with remittance and other use cases with blockchain,” said Thana Thienachariya, Chairman of the Executive Committee of Digital Ventures, a subsidiary of Siam Commercial Bank. “Our due diligence was conducted by Digital Ventures, the investment and innovation arm of SCB, reaffirming our commitment to cultivating a solid fintech ecosystem for Thailand.”
“Distributed financial technology is already beginning to transform the financial system, and we’re excited to help Ripple drive even broader adoption of its enterprise solutions in Asia and around the world,” said President and CEO of SBI Holdings Yoshitaka Kitao. “Following the recent creation of our joint venture SBI Ripple Asia and in light of incredible customer growth, we are very pleased to increase our investment in Ripple.”
To learn more about Ripple’s solutions and relevant use cases for financial institutions, please visit Ripple.com.
About Ripple
Ripple provides global financial settlement solutions to ultimately enable the world to exchange value like it already exchanges information – giving rise to an Internet of Value (IoV). Ripple solutions lower the total cost of settlement by enabling banks to transact directly and with real-time certainty, optionally using the digital asset XRP to further reduce liquidity costs. Banks around the world are partnering with Ripple to improve their cross-border payment offerings, and to join its growing, global network of financial institutions and liquidity providers.
Ripple is a venture-backed startup with offices in San Francisco, New York, London, Sydney and Luxembourg. As an industry advocate for the Internet of Value, Ripple sits on the Federal Reserve’s Faster Payments Task Force Steering Committee and co-chairs the W3C’s Web Payments Working Group.