Exclusive: Crypto startup LI.FI raises $29 million for cross-blockchain price discovery tool
When companies decide to engage with crypto, they quickly discover that the landscape is fragmented between many blockchains. If they want to move assets between different chains, they often have to rely on a technology called bridging which can be insecure and expensive. Philipp Zentner, co-founder and CEO of LI.FI, created his company to address these issues. The startup offers businesses price comparisons of exchange rates and switching fees. It also aims to find businesses the most efficient and cost-effective route for each transaction.
On Thursday, LI.FI announced that it had raised $29 million in funding led by Multicoin and CoinFund, bringing the total capital to approximately $52 million. Zentner did not disclose the company’s valuation.
“You can think of us as a combination of Google Flights and Google Maps,” he said in an interview with Fortune. “[We’re] competitive pricing comparison and transaction guidance for businesses in the crypto finance industry.
The companies LI.FI partners with include fintechs, brokerage apps, trading desks, wallets, and neobanks. The startup has more than 800 partners, including Robinhood, Binance and Kraken. The company says its value proposition is that its service helps businesses get to market faster and saves them time on research, integration and maintenance.
Zentner says LI.FI is profitable and generates revenue through transaction fees, although he declined to disclose specific revenue figures. Its monthly trading volume stood at $8 billion in October, about seven times higher than its monthly volume a year earlier. The company has more than 100 employees.
“As crypto trading becomes a core functionality of traditional fintech applications, the most challenging problem is making sharded blockchains, liquidity and execution work together seamlessly,” Spencer Applebaum, investment partner at Multicoin Capital, said in a statement. “The LI.FI protocol provides fintechs and Web3 wallets with a single API to offer both trading and cross-chain asset movement, handling on-chain routing and execution behind the scenes.”
With this new funding, LI.FI plans to expand into different trading areas, including perpetual futures, yield opportunities, prediction markets and lending markets. Zentner says that with the new capital he also aims to hire more employees.
