Crossover Markets, a digital asset trading technology firm focused on institutional liquidity requirements, has announced securing $12 million in a Series A funding round led by Illuminate Financial and DRW Venture Capital.

Crossover plans to use the fresh funding to expand its team, further develop its execution-only electronic communication network, CROSSx, an institutional trading venue for digital assets, and bring 24/7 trading to additional asset classes, according to a statement on Wednesday.

"This fundraise comes at a time when institutional market structure is changing in digital assets," Crossover Markets co-founder and CEO Brandon Mulvihill said. "Prime brokerage and central clearing models are advancing, creating fungibility and exposing execution venues that hold clients captive. Illuminate brings enormous depth of knowledge across the institutional landscape, and DRW adds significant expertise as one of the largest, multi-asset market makers in the world."

Illuminate Financial founder and Managing Partner Mark Beeston will also join Crossover’s board as part of the deal, alongside American Financial Exchange CFO and former Euronext FX CEO Kevin Wolf.

"Illuminate Financial has been building out a portfolio of institutional grade digital assets infrastructure companies since 2019 as part of our thesis around the convergence of traditional finance and digital asset market structure," Beeston said. "Crossover adds best-in-class execution capability to that portfolio, serving both the immediate and long-term needs of financial institutions that wish to trade digital assets with a future-proof 24/7 low latency infrastructure that traditional markets are increasingly moving towards."

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In April, Crossover Markets reported facilitating more than $3.15 billion in notional trading value, 415,450 trades and over 141 billion quotes on CROSSx in Q1.

"Digital assets market structure is experiencing a pivotal change driven by institutional needs and activity. Simultaneously, we are witnessing the early-stage emergence of discussions around 24/7 trading across traditional asset classes,” Mulvihill added. “CROSSx is designed to be among the fastest, highest-performance venues in any asset class. More specifically, we developed the platform to bring 24/7 trading, price precision and size precision characteristics to traditional markets where technology is lagging in such areas.” 

The venture capital firms join Crossover’s existing strategic investors, including Flow Traders, Laser Digital, Two Sigma, Wintermute, and retail brokers such as Exness, Gate.io, GMO, Pepperstone, Trademax and Think Markets.