When TRM Labs cofounders Esteban Castaño and Rahul Raina moved to San Francisco in 2018 to create a startup, their mentors told them that great companies are built when you believe something about the world that others don’t. Along with a passion for technology and national security, the pair shared a conviction that billions of people would use digital assets to move money around the world.
“Then we asked ourselves, ‘What’s the second order consequence?’” Castaño said. “The world would need intelligence to make sense of that data to ultimately manage risk, and thankfully, that turned out to be true.”
Today, thanks to its blockchain analytics software, TRM Labs is a familiar brand to law enforcement agencies across the world, and to a growing number of private companies that employ crypto to move money. On Wednesday, the San Francisco–based startup announced a $70 million Series C funding round, led by its seed investor Blockchain Capital, along with a who’s who of traditional firms including Goldman Sachs, Bessemer, Brevan Howard, Thoma Bravo, and Citi Ventures. The new funding round values TRM Labs at $1 billion, vaulting it into the ranks of so-called crypto unicorns.
TRM’s success was not always a given, especially because its main competitor, Chainalysis, had a four-year headstart. But an early strategic decision to track multiple cryptocurrencies and blockchains at a time when they paled in comparison to Bitcoin, as well as a deep bench of former government investigators, allowed TRM to gain a firm foothold in a crowded ecosystem as governments and private industry realized that blockchain technology was here to stay. Now, as the spread of tokenization and AI upends global payments once again, TRM is poised to enter another period of hypergrowth.
