Elliptic reels in $120M for its cryptocurrency analytics platform

Elliptic Enterprises Ltd., a startup that helps crypto industry players detect illicit blockchain transactions, has raised $120 million in late-stage funding.

The startup stated in its announcement of the Series D round today that growth equity firm One Peak was the lead investor. Nasdaq Ventures, Deutsche Bank and the British Business Bank contributed as well. Elliptic is now worth $670 million.

Elliptic operates a cloud platform, Data Fabric, that collects information on more than 21 million cryptocurrency transactions per day. It combines the data with historical blockchain activity records dating back more than a decade. For added measure, Elliptic distills some of the logs that it collects into data products geared toward specific use cases. Banks, for example, can access a database of malicious wallet addresses that they can use to refine their fraud prevention controls. 

The company makes its blockchain information available through a suite of transaction monitoring tools. Stablecoin issuers, crypto exchange operators and other organizations can use the services to spot illicit activity on their platforms.

One Elliptic product, Lens, generates an alert when a suspicious cryptocurrency transaction goes through a company’s systems. Regulatory compliance teams can view the payments flagged by the platform in a centralized spreadsheet-like interface. Lens explains why it blocked a token transfer attempt, which customers are involved and what blockchain they’re using to move the funds.

Elliptic says the tool enables users to process most alerts in under five minutes. More complex incidents, such as transactions structured to hide the source of the funds being transferred, can be routed to a second Elliptic product called Investigator.

Bad actors often attempt to hide their traces by shuffling funds across multiple blockchains. Investigators can automatically generate a graph that visualizes how a transaction moves between blockchains and crypto wallets. The company says that the software speeds up cross-chain investigations by 30%.

Elliptic also sells a second data visualization tool, Analytics, that enables customers to generate graphs from higher-level data. For example, an exchange operator that is considering making a new stablecoin available on its platform might create a dashboard that visualizes the token’s historical trading volumes. The tool can also display the amount of illicit activity associated with a cryptocurrency or wallet. 

“As digital assets become more embedded in the global financial system, institutions need trusted infrastructure to manage compliance and risk at scale,” said Nasdaq Ventures head Gary Offner. Elliptic’s platform plays an important role in providing that infrastructure.”

Elliptic says its installed base comprises more than 700 organizations. The group includes exchange operators that together account for more than two-thirds of the world’s cryptocurrency transaction volume. 

Image: Elliptic