Amberdata Inc., a startup that provides data on cryptocurrency markets and trading activity for financial institutions, has raised a $15 million funding round to fuel growth initiatives.

Amberdata said in its announcement this morning that the round was led by Citigroup Inc., one of the world’s largest banks. The startup will use the funding to double its research and development team and expand go-to-market operations. 

Amberdata provides a cloud-based platform that enables financial institutions such as banks to access information on cryptocurrency market activity. The startup says that it tracks more than 8 million blockchain network transactions every day. Amberdata makes the data available through application programming interfaces that enable enterprise developers to easily pull cryptocurrency data into their companies’ systems for analysis.

Amberdata’s platform provides intelligence on market activity across a large number of cryptocurrencies and exchanges. Customers can  access specific details about trades, such as how much a seller asked for the digital asset they sold in a transaction and which bidder placed the highest offer. Amberdata also supplies higher-level market signals: Users of its platform can, for example, check how the price of a given cryptocurrency changed over the past two weeks. 

Applications such as automated trading systems that require real-time market data can use Amberdata’s platform to access information on the latest trading activity. Applications that work with historical data, in turn, can pull information on market activity dating back weeks or months. 

Amberdata says that the data it provides has many uses. Companies can use historical market data to train machine learning algorithms for automating financial tasks. A bank’s financial risk management group, meanwhile, could run analyses to identify and address market factors that may impact the value of clients’ investments.

Amberdata says the market insights provided by its platform can also be used to inform specific business decisions. A financial institution looking to team up with a cryptocurrency exchange on a new investment initiative, for example, could prepare list of exchanges and use Amberdata to collect data about the market activity on each. The firm’s analysts could then consult the data to identify the exchange that best meets the initiative’s requirements. 

“Data and insights will continue to play a pivotal role in creating transparency and strengthening risk management frameworks for digital assets,” said Siris Singh, the Americas head of markets strategic investments at Citi. 

Amberdata launched its platform in early 2018. A month and a half after the startup’s platform went live, Chief Executive Officer Shawn Douglass (pictured) appeared on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE studio to share the startup’s vision. “We are going to define the space for operational monitoring analytics for public and private blockchain and be that single pane of glass,” said Douglass.

Amberdata is addressing a growing market opportunity: Demand for cryptocurrency market data among financial institutions is set to increase as more banks introduce digital asset services. Citigroup, which led the startup’s newly announced $15 million round, launched a digital assets unit this year. Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Bank of New York Mellon Corp. and several other major financial institutions have recently also announced plans to become active in parts of the cryptocurrency market.

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