Blockchain startup Digital Asset closes $35M Series C to capture smart contract market with DAML

Digital Asset is a New York-based blockchain startup and the creators of DAML, a new programming language for creating smart contracts, which are computer programs that automate business processes and digitally facilitate, verify, and enforce agreements between two or more entities.

DAML is a next-generation smart contract language that Digital Asset open sourced earlier this year. It is used to create smart contracts, or computer programs that automate business processes and digitally facilitate, verify, and enforce agreements between two or more entities.

Earlier this month, Digital Asset announced it raised $35M in Series C financing funding from new and existing investors. The latest round brings the total amount raised by Digital Asset since its establishment in 2014 to $150 million. The fresh capital infusion will be used to accelerate the adoption of DAML across multiple industries, expand the number and variety of DAML-enabled partner products and fund new products designed to enhance the DAML developer experience, specifically project:DABL, a cloud-based prototyping and production environment for DAML applications. The investment came from new and existing investors.

Since last April when Digital Asset open-sourced DAML, the startup has been working with partners and platform vendors to enable DAML applications to run on multiple distributed ledgers, including VMware Blockchain, Hyperledger Sawtooth, Hyperledger Fabric, Corda, and Amazon’s QLDB and Aurora databases.

Founded in 2014 by Don Wilson, Sunil Hirani, Digital Asset develops distributed ledger technology intended to build distributed, encrypted straight through processing tools. Its technology offer tools for digital ledgers to track and settle digital and mainstream financial assets in a cryptographically secure environment, enabling the financial services industry to improve their efficiency, security, compliance and settlement speed.

“DAML allows you to focus only on what you need to do to differentiate your product and eliminate the complexity that doesn’t provide value to your organization,” said Yuval Rooz, co-founder and CEO of Digital Asset . “Ninety percent of development time is wasted on undifferentiated work. With this new funding we will go further on this mission to focus on the 10 percent value-add by providing a world class smart contract experience regardless of where your application runs.”

Digital Asset provides commercial integrations of DAML with partner platforms to enable a variety of organizations – from the largest enterprises to technology start-ups – to develop secure, sophisticated, compliant, and operationally solid applications faster and deploy them to any ledger. In April, the company announced a partnership with VMware to integrate DAML with VMware Blockchain. Subsequently, further integrations with Hyperledger Sawtooth, Hyperledger Fabric, Corda, and Amazon’s QLDB and Aurora databases have been announced.

“We’re delighted by our investors’ ongoing commitment to helping Digital Asset succeed and achieve its vision,” said Emnet Rios, CFO and COO of Digital Asset. “This new funding will allow us to further expand our support for DAML-enabled platforms, build on the momentum we’ve seen behind DAML worldwide, and serve a growing client base across multiple industries.”