Crypto Startup Amber Seeks Funding For $10 Billion Valuation

Key Insights:

• The Singapore-based firm is mulling a fourth funding round.
• Amber Group is also considering going public in the United States.
• Venture capital is still flooding into crypto startups despite the market slump.

Crypto trading platform Amber Group is mulling a fresh round of funding that would see the company at a valuation of $10 billion.

The Singapore-based firm closed a $200 million round that state investment firm Temasek Holdings led in February. At the time, the firm was valued at $3 billion.

Amber is now in discussions regarding another round, according to a May 6 Bloomberg report citing “people with knowledge of the matter.”

Big VC Bucks Into Crypto

Venture capital firms are still rapacious for anything crypto and Web3 related, as billions in investments have poured into digital asset startups over the past year.

Amber chief executive Michael Wu hinted at another round ahead of a possible initial public offering in the U.S. later this year. February’s raise included contributions from crypto VCs such as Coinbase Ventures, Sequoia China, Pantera Capital, and Tiger Global Management.

According to Crunchbase, Amber held a Series A round for $28 million in February 2020. The firm added to that with a $100 million Series B round in June 2021, followed by its $200 million round in February this year.

The firm, founded in 2018 by five former Morgan Stanley traders, operates in 150 countries, has more than $5 billion in assets on the platform, and $1 trillion in traded volume, according to its website.

Two of the crypto industry’s most prominent venture firms, Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, have recently backed Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter to privatize the micro-blogging platform. The world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, also contributed $500 million of its funds for the endeavor.

Massive Market Slump

The move comes as a broader crypto market sell-off accelerates resulting in one of the largest daily slumps of the year.

Total market capitalization has tanked by 7.4% over the past 24 hours, wiping out a whopping $145 billion from the sector. Crypto markets are now at their lowest levels since late February, with a total market cap of $1.76 trillion.

Bitcoin (BTC) led the drop, as usual, sliding 8.4% on the day to trade at $36,359 at the time of writing. Ethereum (ETH) wasn’t far behind with a dump of 7.1% to $2,735, and many of the rest of the altcoins were even deeper in the red.

However, the daily price action doesn’t appear to have dampened the enthusiasm from those venture capital giants.