Company: nivaura
Founder(s): Dr. Vic Arulchandran
Website: https://www.nivaura.com
Description: Began as a blockchain focused fintech in investment banking business, but over 2016-2018 they actually issued the worlds first compliant tokenised bonds, equities and structured notes; creating the legal and technical precedent for tokenisation in UK and Europe.
About nivaura
nivaura was founded in 2016 as a blockchain focused fintech in investment banking. Between 2016 and 2018 they actually issued the worlds first compliant tokenised bonds, equities and structured notes; creating the legal and technical precedent for tokenisation in UK and Europe.
They were also the only company in the first five cohorts of the FCA Regulatory Sandboxes. They pivoted in 2018 after raising funding because they wanted to focus on a core SaaS product that banks can use today, which would generate recurring revenue, while continuing with the blockchain experimentation in PoC form separately. They deployed platforms to Santander, DBS Bank in Asia and the London Stock Exchange Group, to digitise and automate bond issuance.
What sets us apart from competitors is that they are the only fintech providing SaaS deployments in bank environments, where others are providing central platforms, which we believe will ultimately fail for several reasons, such as banks wanting to control and own the data they create, the need to tailor the solution and integrate with internal systems, and the desire for experimentation with blockchain transactions.
Another point to note is that SaaS platform sales in investment banking require at least 1.5-2 years to close, need multiple internal team sign offs, and the technology stack is significantly more complex than single, centralised competitor platforms.
One of their clients alone, DBS Bank, have transacted over SGD 3bn on their deployment of our SaaS platform, which far exceeds volumes on all our competitors platforms combined. They also weathered the storm of COVID and the current slump in the funding climate, and are raising another round at a higher valuation, while we rebuild their sales pipeline (since COVID put a stop to everything non-essential in banking) and close new deals.
They also conducted a pilot transaction with NatWest and Santander earlier this year for the first bond issuance using the Finality payment network to settle the payment.