Financial data giant S&P Global and institutional wealth manager State Street Corp. are investing $ 15 million in Lukka, the blockchain data startup set to boost S&P's upcoming cryptocurrency indices Dow Jones Indices.
Lukka's partnership with S&P Dow Jones Indices
CPA.com, the for-profit division of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), also participated in Series C, said Lukka CEO Robert Materazzi. This is S&P's first equity firm in the cryptocurrency industry and the latest in a long line for State Street.
The investment adds institutional weight to a crypto startup that is moving closer to the financial mainstream. Last week, S&P Dow Jones Indices, one of the largest indices providers in the world, launched a partnership with Lukka that will ultimately provide price points on 550 cryptocurrencies on Wall Street.
Such data could be a boon to desks eager to signal an asset class that many investors still struggle to understand, let alone know how to quote. But Lukka doesn't just deal with prices and quotations.
The company creates data management software for exchanges and data standardization tools for companies traversing the cryptosphere, although it is perhaps best known in the cryptocurrency industry as a tax software developer. Regardless of the product, Lukka's focus remains on analyzing complex datasets of objects that companies and people can use, Materazzi said.
Future perspectives
Series C is Lukka's first stock sale since founder Jake Benson left the company in June. Founded in 2014, Lukka had raised $ 25 million in two previous rounds of shares, both when the company was operating as "Libra".
The company was renamed Lukka in late March 2019 with U.S. Patent and Trademark Office records showing a trademark transfer to Facebook (FB) in April 2019, months before the stablecoin project - now called Diem - was announced in June 2019.
Materazzi said Lukka's successes largely stem from his ability to create institutional-grade software for cryptocurrencies that financial traditionalists feel comfortable using.
Basically, this means that Lukka's platforms follow the methodologies, accounting standards, and audit guidelines that any platform must use to be taken seriously in the environment.
This rigor is taken for granted in traditional finance, but in cryptocurrencies it has a whole other weight. It is a sign of an industry trying to make its way into "rich" finance. Lukka provides crypto datasets to over 160 active crypto funds. Previously, it had already entered into business partnerships with the three main investors in this round.
“Hopefully the result [of new investments] will be to introduce ourselves more in the traditional sector of financial services, because we are already quite well known in the crypto sector ”, concluded Materazzi.
