When businesses decide to engage with crypto, they quickly discover the landscape is fragmented across numerous blockchains. If they want to move assets between different chains, they must often rely on a technology called bridging that can prove insecure and expensive. Philipp Zentner, cofounder and CEO of LI.FI, created his company to address these issues. The startup provides businesses with price comparisons of exchange rates and bridging fees. It also aims to find businesses the most efficient and cost-effective pathway for each transaction.
On Thursday, LI.FI announced that it raised $29 million in funding led by Multicoin and CoinFund, bringing the total capital to about $52 million. Zentner did not disclose the company’s valuation.
“You can think of us like a combination of Google Flights and Google Maps,” he said in an interview with Fortune. “[We’re] a competitive price comparison and transaction pathfinding for businesses in crypto finance.”
The businesses that LI.FI partners with are fintechs, brokerage apps, trading desks, wallets, and neobanks. The startup has more than 800 partners, including Robinhood, Binance, and Kraken. The company says that its value proposition is that its service allows companies to go to market faster and saves them time on research, integration, and maintenance.
Zentner says that LI.FI is profitable and generates revenue through transaction fees, though he declined to disclose specific revenue numbers. It has $8 billion in monthly transaction volume as of October, which is about seven times more than its monthly volume from a year prior. The company has more than 100 employees.
“As crypto trading becomes a core feature inside mainstream fintech apps, the hardest problem is…making fragmented blockchains, liquidity, and execution work seamlessly together,” said Spencer Applebaum, investment partner at Multicoin Capital, in a statement. “LI.FI Protocol gives fintechs and web3 wallets a single API to offer both trading and cross-chain asset movement, handling on-chain routing and execution behind the scenes.”
With the new funding, LI.FI plans to expand into different transaction domains, including perpetual futures, yield opportunities, prediction markets, and lending markets. Zentner says with the new capital he also aims to hire more employees.
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