Ledger, a leading bitcoin hardware wallet provider, has announced that it has raised $7 million in series A funding led by MAIF Avenir.
The funding round also saw the participation of Xange, Wicklow Capital, GDTRE, Libertus Capital, Digital Currency Group, The Whittemore Collection, Kima Ventures, BHB Network and Nicolas Pinto. It follows a $1.5M round in 2015, bring the total funding to $8.5M.
“By investing in Ledger, MAIF intends to contribute to the development of the Blockchain ecosystem, a new source of confidence to record transactions, based on peer-to-peer exchanges. MAIF is proud to support Ledger into its objective to become the world leader in distributed trust”, Jean-Marc Willmann, Deputy General Director, MAIF, said.
Ledger flagship products include the Ledger Nano S and the Ledger Blue, hardware wallets securing cryptocurrencies and digital identities. The startup revealed that it going to launch enterprise grade cryptocurrency security solutions (multi-signature, multi-currency, time locked payments…) this year, targeting marketplaces, hedge funds and financial institutions.
According to the official announcement, Ledger intends to use the new funding to develop the sales, marketing, engineering, and support teams through the recruitment of 20 new collaborators. It said that this will help accelerate the launch of a new enterprise security product for cryptocurrencies, opening new lines of revenues for Ledger.
“Ledger has seen a tremendous growth in the last months, and we are on track to increase tenfold our revenues this year. Our primary objective is to reinforce our position as a global market leader on hardware wallet products, while we accelerate the development of enterprise cryptocurrency solutions through the signature of soon to be announced strategic partnership agreements. We are also actively pursuing research & development on hardware oracle technology with key industrial customers for smart grid, supply chain and insurance blockchain use cases”, Eric Larchevêque, CEO of Ledger, said.
In addition, Ledger also announced a new enterprise product launch scheduled for Q3 2017.
“Ledger introduces an enterprise grade cold storage solution based on HSM (Hardware Security Module) and hardware authenticators. It is a turnkey SaaS hardware/software suite enabling multi-currency, multi-signature, rate limiting and time locking. The solution is fully trustless, with emergency recovery procedures available even in the case of force majeure”, Ledger said.
