Wintermute Raises $2.8M Series A Funding Led by Lightspeed Venture Partners to Make Crypto Markets More Liquid and Efficient

LONDON & MENLO PARK, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Wintermute, an algorithmic liquidity provider for digital assets, today announced the close of a $2.8M Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners (“Lightspeed”). This new round of funding will help Wintermute accelerate its expansion into new liquidity products, specifically: derivatives, over-the counter (OTC) market making and DeFi, enabling Wintermute to further contribute to the liquid and efficient markets across the crypto eco-system.

“The growing number of crypto exchanges is leading to an increased need for market making, and that is where Wintermute comes in,” said Jeremy Liew, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners. “With its strategic, tech-first approach, Wintermute is making it easier for retail and institutional investors to buy and sell crypto.”

Wintermute is a next generation, crypto-native market maker, focused on building a decentralized financial system by creating efficient, liquid markets with transparent prices. The Wintermute team has built a proprietary tech stack for crypto market making, applying best practices of high frequency trading (HFT), algorithmic trading and market making from traditional financial markets.

Wintermute is on a mission to become the “invisible hand of the market”, the largest crypto market maker that provides liquidity to markets seamlessly, making them more efficient and professional, while supporting the projects that are best positioned to revolutionize finance as we know it. Since the company’s launch in 2017, the team has quickly become one of the largest liquidity providers in spot and perpetuals markets, covering 500 pairs across most vetted crypto exchanges and trading platforms. Wintermute’s proprietary trading system connects a large number of liquidity pools across centralized and decentralized sources and the company is leading in the provision of liquidity for new products (e.g. ETPs), new listings and new projects.

“We made a deliberate decision to be a technology company, not a financial services one, and it’s our tech-first approach that enables us to develop liquidity solutions that will drive the growth of the overall market in both the near and long-term,” said Evgeny Gaevoy, founder and CEO, Wintermute. “This investment from Lightspeed — a firm that is known for its expertise in disruptive tech innovations — further validates our vision and enables us to accelerate building of the next generation trading technology.”

This latest round of funding comes on the heels of the seed round the company closed in February 2020, led by Blockchain.com Ventures, the venture arm of Blockchain.com, a long-term Wintermute business partner. For more information on Wintermute, visit: www.wintermute.com.

About Wintermute

Wintermute (“Wintermute Trading, LTD”) is a global algorithmic liquidity provider for digital assets. Wintermute’s mission is to create liquid, efficient and transparent markets for institutional and retail investors across all vetted trading platforms. Founded and managed by experienced traders and engineers from traditional financial markets, Wintermute brings the best practices of algorithmic and high-frequency trading into digital asset markets. www.wintermute.com

About Lightspeed Venture Partners

Lightspeed Venture Partners is a multi-stage venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the Enterprise and Consumer sectors. Over the past two decades, the Lightspeed team has backed hundreds of entrepreneurs and helped build more than 400 companies globally, including Snap, Nest, Nutanix, AppDynamics, MuleSoft, OYO, Guardant, StitchFix, and GrubHub. Lightspeed and its affiliates currently manage $10.5B across the global Lightspeed platform, with investment professionals and advisors in Silicon Valley, Israel, India, China, Southeast Asia and Europe. www.lsvp.com