Vestigo Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on making investments in fintech companies, and CMT Digital, a division of the CMT Group, focused on crypto asset trading, blockchain technology investments and legal / policy engagement, announced today the participation in a $3.4 million financing round for FRST, the leading provider of timely, high-fidelity, actionable data for professional traders of digital assets.
The funding round was led by CMT Digital and Vestigo Ventures. Other participants in the round included Akuna Capital and principals from Premier Asset Management and Oak Ridge Investments.
FRST is an enterprise-grade, trading-floor-ready technology suite that allows professional traders to perceive, categorize and act upon transactions involving digital assets. The company’s technology rapidly identifies digital currency token trades before they are moved from a wallet to an external party or exchange, providing important insights for firms trading cryptocurrencies.
“Cryptocurrencies are here to stay but – similar to other less mature markets – the infrastructure necessary to ensure access to trusted, transparent and actionable information to date has been lacking; FRST has successfully filled this void. As the first to bring its cryptocurrency monitoring technology to market, FRST has a clear customer focus, starting with high-performance trading floors. These factors position FRST as an ideal investment, as it supports Vestigo’s thesis of investing in companies that create market structures and operational solutions.”
“We view Vestigo Ventures and CMT Digital as important strategic investors for FRST. Vestigo Ventures has in-house data science assets through its access to resources from Cogo Labs, a deep understanding of blockchain, and strong relationships with people addressing the difficult problems in this ecosystem. CMT Digital brings trading, technical, markets and quantitative investing expertise, in addition to extensive legal and policy understanding, to the table. We look forward to working closely with Vestigo and CMT Digital as FRST moves from beta to release over the coming months.”
“Many aspects of the trade lifecycle have been invisible up until now; assets changing hands at primary issuance, projects liquidating the proceeds of their token offerings, and tokens moving into and out of exchanges, FRST’s technology makes all of this activity visible and trackable and enables traders to trigger custom alerts and notifications, providing improved situational awareness to traders seeking an edge. Combining the data science knowledge from CMT Digital with FRST’s trading and technology skills will enable us to build a world-class data intelligence platform that allows users to upload their own datasets to look for correlations across their own data and third-party data, including data from non-crypto markets and FRST’s uniquely-annotated blockchain datasets.”
