Fintech start-up Nivaura has raised 20 million dollars (￡15 million) in a funding round led by the London Stock Exchange Group to expand its headcount. The company is currently working on automated issuance and administration of financial instruments, such as loans, bonds and structured notes. It has recently teamed up with UK-based platform Fineqia to issue tokenised bonds on a public Ethereum blockchain. According to Nivaura CEO, Dr Avtar Sehra, the company is aiming to launch “a series of high-profile, large-scale projects” in cooperation with its partners. Nivaura closed the original seed round in October 2017 and the first extension round in January 2018. The firm did not provide a breakdown of the three rounds but said the one that just closed was “significantly larger than the preceding two,” meaning most of the $20 million is freshly raised. The proceeds will be used to increase headcount “significantly across all areas” (including hires in machine learning and natural language processing) expand into the U.S. and Asia, and invest in further R&D, Nivaura said. London Stock Exchange chief executive Nikhil Rathi has been appointed as a Nivaura board member. Allen & Overy senior debt capital markets lawyer Richard Cohen has joined the firm as general counsel and head of strategy, while former HSBC banking and markets division vice chairman Spencer Lake has joined as a board member. |
