Sfox raises $23m in funding to build faster, connected platform

Sfox, the Silicon Valley-based crypto-trading platform said it had raised $23m in new investment led by venture capital firms Tribe Capital and Social Capital.

Sfox raises $23m in funding to develop its trading platform

The start-up’s aim is to facilitate large trades by routing investors’ orders to multiple trading venues to achieve better prices and faster transaction times.

Co-founders

Sfox was co-founded in 2014 by Akbar Thobhani, a software engineer and head of development at Airbnb, and George Melika, another software engineer who build trading platforms for Nuveen, the asset manager. Thobhani, according to his Sfox website biography “started mining bitcoins at MIT before it was cool”.

The Sfox platform connects to digital currency exchanges and over-the-counter (OTC) desks, enabling the company to get the lowest prices for buyers, and the highest for sellers by using a so-called “smart router”.

Also, by connecting to multiple trading venues – and Thobhani says it is connected to “almost every single one” – it accesses the greatest pools of liquidity enabling faster trade execution.

Institutional investors courted

In building its platform, Sfox aims to court institutional investors and it will use the $23m in series A funding to pursue regulatory approval in more states. It is currently registered as a prime dealer in 22 state, but not New York, where it is likely to gain access to the most institutional support.

Other investors in the $23m funding were start-up accelerator Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, Blockchain Capital and Digital Currency Group.