ZenGo, a crypto mobile wallet for retail investors, today announced it has closed a $20 million Series A round led by Insight Partners with participation from Distributed Global (in partnership with Temasek Holdings) and Austin Rief Ventures, as well as existing investors Benson Oak Ventures, Samsung Next, Elron, Collider Ventures, FJ Labs, and others.
The ZenGo team plans to use the funds to expand its set of services, including a Visa payment card, and a larger set of choices for on-ramp, off-ramp, trade, and savings options. Additional plans include expanded support for assets and chains – currently, the wallet supports over 50 assets including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Binance Coin, Tezos, and Terra – and further developing its keyless wallet security technology.
Unlike existing hosted or self-hosted solutions, ZenGo’s multi-party computation (MPC)-based keyless wallet technology replaces the traditional and notorious crypto private key with two independently created mathematical secret shares, while remaining on-chain and user-controlled. ZenGo cannot access users’ funds, and unlike traditional self-hosted wallets, backup and restoration of accounts are simply secured using facial biometrics. This approach allows ZenGo to safely and seamlessly put full ownership and control of digital assets in its users’ hands.
“We believe that a true crypto-based future will require solutions that are radically simple, mobile-first, and built on-chain. Our approach to security, based on MPC, eliminates traditional single points of failure, and has helped us build an innovative consumer-grade wallet that makes crypto simpler, and also an order of magnitude safer.”
– Ouriel Ohayon Co-Founder and CEO at ZenGo
The investment comes less than a year after the company launched its wallet on iOS and Android in early 2020, and less than three months after it shattered its previous annual processing volume records reaching $100M USD in the first quarter of 2021 alone.