Mesh Connect Inc., a startup that provides a system for enterprise businesses to manage digital assets, said Thursday that it completed a $22 million funding round to build out its platform, which helps customers maintain control over virtual assets such as cryptocurrencies.

The Series A funding round was led by Money Forward Inc. with participation from new investors including Galaxy Ventures and Samsung Next. Existing investors joining the round included Streamlined Ventures, SNR.VC, Hike VC, Heitner Group, Valon Capital, Altair Capital, Network VC and Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi. This round of funding brought the total raised by the company to more than $32 million.

Mesh was founded in 2020 as a consumer-facing platform named Front Finance, but it recently rebranded itself in the last year as it pivoted to an enterprise-focused financial technology platform designed to assist users with managing their virtual assets.

Using Mesh’s platform, businesses can let customers deposit, hold and move digital assets across different platforms, assets that can include cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and Ethereum. The system is embeddable into customers’ existing infrastructure and apps, which allows them to perform payments and transfers as well as interact with more than 300 cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets without leaving their own system.

It does this without application programming keys, no need to copy or paste crypto addresses and it doesn’t store any personally identifying information. The idea behind Mesh’s layer is to be completely pass-though and to provide essentially an account aggregation and management layer for enterprise customers so they can abstract away the servicing portion of interacting with digital assets.

“Embedded finance is going to be a $7 trillion market opportunity,” said Bam Azizi, co-founder and chief executive of Mesh. “We are witnessing a massive shift in which consumers are demanding complete and transparent control over their assets, and expecting the financial services that they use to give them that control.”

Use cases for Mesh’s platform include enabling outfits building streamlined mobile or web experiences such as neobanks that provide their customers one-stop shops for their cash and virtual assets with real-time access to their funds. It can also be used for personal finance and investing applications with real-time portfolio management and embedded trading capabilities, or for “decentralized finance,” a system of cryptocurrency technology that offers services and products without the need for intermediaries such as banks and exchanges.

Mesh claims that it has gained so far inked deals with more than 70 companies across finance and digital assets within a year of pivoting to an enterprise-focused platform.

Building on this increasing interest in its platform, the company said that it will use the new funding to push for broader adoption of its current solutions, ramp up its core operations and do more outreach to potential customers. Its near-term focus will be to build on the transactional aspects of its connection layer to develop more use cases such for deposits, payments and payouts using digital assets.

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