Today Singapore trade finance startup #dltledgers announced a US$7 million Series A raise and simultaneously said it’s switching enterprise blockchain technologies from Hyperledger Fabric to R3’s Corda.
The funding was led by India’s Regus and Savou, Vittal, and existing investor Walden International. It follows a previous $2.5 million seed raise from Walden International.
As of five months ago, #dltledgers reported SGD3 billion ($2.22 billion) in trade transactions and today said it had more than 200% YoY growth but did not provide specific figures.
The company boasts numerous corporate clients, including Shiseido, Wilmar, Mitsui, Wipro Unza, Vertiv, and Schneider Electric as well as more than 500 SMEs. It also claims more than 45 banks as platform users, including ANZ, DBS, Standard Chartered Bank, and Rabobank.
While #dltledgers may be a startup, to our knowledge, it has significantly more traction than the very well-funded Corda trade finance consortia platforms Marco Polo and Contour. Although in fairness, Contour only recently went into production.
Hence this is a big win for R3. “We are ecstatic that one of the world’s fastest-growing trade digitisation platforms is moving to Corda,” said R3’s CEO David Rutter.
For Hyperledger, #dltledgers was an important early case study. It’s not the first platform to switch to Corda. Two years ago, fraud mitigation platform MonetaGo made the same switch. It provides a trade finance anti-fraud solution with very significant traction in India, and was adopted by SWIFT India.
In mid-2018, other high profile switches to Corda were the two big insurance consortia, B3i (from Fabric) and RiskStream (from Ethereum). However, RiskStream (formerly RiskBlock) recently transitioned to the Kaleido platform, which supports both Ethereum and Corda. The reasons for the latest RiskBlock switch included speed to production, efficiency, and the ability to offer multiple technology platforms.
#dltledgers founder Samir Neji said, “By migrating our blockchain platform to Corda, the first purpose-built blockchain for enterprise, our current and future clients will benefit from unparalleled security, transparency and performance that comes with Corda.”
He continued, “The injection of funding will help #dltledgers to amplify its work on partnerships, standards, integration, as well as accelerating product development in several areas. One area is Cognitive Document Automation (CDA) — a unique combination of graphical processing, machine learning, and blockchain — further reducing the effort required to reconcile invoices, purchase orders, packing lists, and other trade documents.”
We had several questions for #dltledgers and will update the article with their responses.
These include:
- What drove the switch to Corda?
- Fabric has some traction in China. But Corda does not. How does that impact plans?
- Did R3 or any executive invest in the Series A?
- How abstracted was the Fabric functionality. ie. how big a task, how long will it take?
- Does that mean the Singapore trade registry will migrate? Or is Fabric better for that use case?
- Atul Patel has been an active participant in Hyperledger. Will that change?
Funding valuation gaps
It’s also notable that #dltledgers $7 million funding has been in the works for quite a while. In the meantime, another Singapore trade finance platform Triterras listed through a SPAC, at one point achieving unicorn status. However, its market capitalization is currently below $600 million and it ran into some controversy. It uses alternative funding sources rather than banks.
Triterras claims to have processed $8.7 billion in transactions, so it’s maybe a little more than twice as big as #dltledgers in terms of transactions. We don’t know #dltledgers revenues, so it’s not a like-for-like comparison. Both are blockchain trade platforms in the same sector but seem to have dramatically different valuations.