Avanti Financial raises $37 million to launch institutional crypto bank

The Avanti Financial Group has announced that it has raised $37 million in a Series A round, bringing the company closer to launch as a digital asset bank.

In a March 25 announcement, Avanti stated that it will use the proceeds to fund the required regulatory capital needed for launch, in addition to funding development and other operating expenses. The round brings the total amount raised to $44 million.

Participants in the round are a who’s who of institutional investors including Coinbase Ventures, Binance.US, Morgan Creek Digital, Madison Paige Ventures, AP Capital, and Susquehanna Private Equity Investments, in addition to individuals including Trace Mayer and some of Avanti’s executives and directors. The University of Wyoming Foundation also contributed to the funding round.

Avanti was founded in 2020 as a Wyoming bank engineered to serve as a regulatory compliant bridge between U.S. dollar payments systems and digital assets. The firm first gained bank charter status from the state of Wyoming in October 2020 and was the second crypto company to become a bank after Kraken Financial which received the bank charter in September of the same year.

Founder and CEO of Avanti Financial, Caitlin Long, stated that the firm has received more than 2,500 inbound customer inquiries since announcing its bank charter approval and looks forward to starting to serve clients later this year. She did not reveal any details about a launch date but mentioned that a fully regulated dollar-pegged stablecoin was in the pipeline.

“Our roadmap includes offering API-based U.S. dollar payment services for wires, ACH and SWIFT; issuance of our tokenized, programmable U.S. dollar called Avit; and custody and on-/off-ramp services for bitcoin and other digital assets.”

In an interview with Cointelegraph in September 2020, Caitlin Long confirmed that Avanti has no intentions of becoming an exchange and will be for institutional investors only.

Early Bitcoin adopter and entrepreneur Trace Mayer, who formed the consortium that led Avanti’s Series A, stated that Avanti is extremely well-positioned to address the need for legally compliant operators in the digital asset industry as markets mature.