Symbiont Starts Assembly Line with $20 Million Boost

Blockchain company Symbiont has received $20 million in funding after closing out another funding round, which it will use to commercialize its smart-contract platform, Assembly.

The Series B funding round was led by Nasdaq Ventures which, as part of the transaction, will be embarking on a strategic partnership with Symbiont to integrate Assembly into is Financial Framework project. Other investors in this round were Galaxy Digital, Citi and Raptor Group.

The funding will be used for activities around the commercialization project, including new hires in operations and accounting.

Mark Smith, co-founder, and CEO at Symbiont says the company’s focus is shifting more to bring Assembly to market and creating more partnership opportunities to use the solution.

“The funding round helps beyond adding capital, but more importantly it brings more partnership opportunities,” Smith says. “We have always been an engineering-heavy firm but we are a growing firm; we also just moved into a new office. We want to focus on the production of our solutions and be an operations firm. The funds we raised ensure we are funded into the future.”

Assembly is a distributed platform where companies can start building smart contracts to issue, manage and trade financial instruments while maintaining a single golden record. Symbiont has already partnered with companies like Vanguard, Ranieri Solutions, and Ipreo for applications using Assembly for data management, mortgages, and syndicated loans respectively.

Smith says with the funding round, Symbiont and Nasdaq can explore how to integrate Assembly into the Nasdaq Financial Framework to quickly set up new marketplaces using digital tokens. Both firms are also working on a way to create a product out of Assembly’s software development kit.

Smith notes Symbiont will continue working on its various blockchain and smart-contract partnerships and projects even though it is now embarking on commercializing Assembly. Symbiont is one of the partners for a blockchain solution for syndicated loans, along with Ipreo and Credit Suisse. It was also working on the Delaware Blockchain Initiative that sought to develop uses for distributed ledger in registering companies for incorporation, but is no longer involved in the project.

“We are still focused on all of our major partnerships but we have taken stock to see where our expertise was really needed which is in smart contracts,” Smith says. “We have achieved all our goals in Delaware which we needed to do to be comfortable in creating a lot of solutions, now we’re focused on the private sector.”