Ripple, the blockchain platform for the banking industry has announced the closure of a successful fundraising round. In this second investment round, the platform has raised $55 million from multiple investors. The US-based Ripple platform is known to offer blockchain based cross-border payments technology for banks. The technology enables banks to transfer funds to branches across geographies at costs much lesser than the conventional methods. With the latest fundraising round, the total funds raised by the company so far stands at $93 million. With the influx of fresh funds, Ripple plans to expand its reach as well as the team. The CEO and co-founder of Ripple, Chris Larsen says, “We have a ton of resources now that will allow us to continue to grow. The team is now about 135 people. And we’re aggressively growing, especially in our integration and engineering groups.” The recent investment made by banking and financial groups indicates an increasing interest among the banking community to be part of the evolution and implementation of blockchain technology in their industry. The investors who have participated in the recent funding round includes Standard Chartered, Accenture, SCB Digital Ventures, Siam Commercial Bank (venture arm) and SBI Holdings. Other existing investors in Ripple platform includes Google Ventures, IDG Capital Partners, AME Cloud Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. According to a leading news platform , the latest investment by Siam Commercial Bank in Ripple makes it the first Thailand based banking company to invest in Blockchain technology. “Our participation makes SCB the first Thai commercial bank to move forward with remittance and other use cases with blockchain,” says Thana Thienachariya, the executive chairman of Digital Ventures unit of Siam Commercial Bank. The growing interest in Ripple among the financial institutions overlaps with the increasing participation of various international banking majors in […]
