Quick take:
- The latest funding brings the total raised to $28 million, with the blockchain-based derivatives platform having previously raised $8 million.
- Ostium’s decentralised perpetual future trading platform allows users to trade real-world assets like stocks, metals, oil, and some cryptocurrencies.
- Co-founder and CEO Kaledora Kiernan-Linn said his platform is more comparable to the likes of eToro, Robinhood, and IG than it is to Hyperliquid, Lighter, and Aster.
Ostium, a decentralised crypto exchange platform co-founded by Harvard graduates, has raised $20 million in a funding round led by General Catalyst and Jump Trading. The fundraising also attracted participation from Coinbase Ventures, Wintermute, and GSR.
The latest funding brings the total raised to $28 million, following the perpetual futures trading platform’s previous total raise of $8 million. The round was executed at a valuation of $250 million, according to a report by Fortune.
Ostium offers decentralized perpetual futures trading for a variety of real-world assets, including stocks, metals, and oil, as well as some cryptocurrencies.
According to the company co-founder and CEO CEO Kaledora Kiernan-Linn, Ostium does not see decentralised perpetual futures trading platforms Hyperiquid, Lighter, and Aster as its main rivals. Instead, the team’s vision is closer to traditional derivatives platforms like eToro, Robinhood, and IG.
Founded in 2022 by Kiernan-Linn and Marco Antonio Ribeiro, Ostium is targeting the offshore broker market, as it seeks to give non-U.S. investors access to U.S. markets. Kiernan-Linn believes Ostium can disrupt the slow and opaque brokerage technology currently available for such traders.
“There’s really very, very few people building in the space at all, or certainly not talking about it in crypto,” she said. “And it is a textbook use case for blockchain,” she said.
Commenting on his firm’s leading role in the fundraising, Marc Bhargava, managing director at General Catalyst, told Fortune: “We live in a world where traditional financial institutions and financial products still have a lot of relevance, but at the same time, there’s this growing group of consumers and this growing asset class in crypto.”
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