Privy, a blockchain infrastructure company, has raised an additional $15 million in a funding round led by Ribbit Capital.
The latest investment, announced Wednesday, includes participation by Sequoia Capital, Paradigm, and Coinbase. The company’s valuation in the round was not disclosed.
It brings Privy’s total funding to over $40 million.
Privy, based in New York, works with businesses that want to offer blockchain-based services by providing software developers tools that aim to make it easy to connect an existing crypto wallet to an application or website.
Henri Stern, Privy’s co-founder and CEO, told Coins2Day that he sees crypto wallets as the gateway to onboarding mainstream users into the blockchain universe and therefore, has built a company around enabling broader access to crypto wallets. “If we can make crypto more usable for everyone, we can make it more useful for everyone, and we can widen the aperture of what types of apps can be built on these rails and actually provide real value to end users,” he said.
The company’s primary product is a set of tools for web developers that integrate into a website or mobile app, letting users connect their crypto wallets without having to log in on a different page. The tools consist of software development kits (SDKs) and applications programming interfaces (APIs).
“We are seeing that the wallets are the nexus of how to give users access to…digital value, and we want to help developers easily leverage this as part of their core app,” Stern said.
When Privy announced its previous funding round in 2023, the company serviced around one million crypto wallet accounts and worked with 40 different businesses. Since then, Privy has grown to service around 50 million accounts and works with 1,000 businesses ranging from restaurant loyalty company Blackbird to NFT marketplace OpenSea.
Other companies offer similar crypto wallet infrastructure including a startup called Reown. Reown markets itself as helping developers build websites with its set of SDKs that aim to make it simpler for users to connect their crypto wallet to websites or applications.
Privy charges customers a monthly fee based on the number of active wallets that are connected to the company’s application. Stern declined to disclose the company’s annual revenue but said it has grown by a factor of 25 since late 2023.
The company will use the money in its latest round to double the size of its 25-person team within the next 18 months, Stern said.
