The expansion round, which TRM labs raised an additional $130 million, was spearheaded by the private equity company Thoma Bravo.
TRM Labs, a blockchain-based intelligence firm, revealed on Nov. 9 that it has increased the size of its Series B investment round by $70 million, bringing the total raised to $130 million. Thoma Bravo, a Series B investor and one of the biggest private equity firms in the world, oversees more than $122 billion in assets.Thoma Bravo led the round, which also included prior TRM investors Goldman Sachs, PayPal Ventures, Amex Ventures, and Citi Ventures.
The expansion comes after TRM’s $60 Million Series B financing, which was led by Tiger Global in December 2021.According to the company, the funds will support talent acquisition and product development to deliver easily accessible tools to combat fraud and illicit finance. They will also help meet the demand for incident response services and training programs.
“Demand has never been stronger for solutions that help protect crypto users, impede illicit actors, and support blockchain-based innovation,”
stated Esteban Castaño, co-founder and CEO of TRM. Since the company’s original Series B funding in December, it has acquired CSITech, a cryptocurrency and blockchain investigative company noted for its proficiency in blockchain forensics, and introduced Chainsbuse, a free platform for reporting scams that is powered by the community.
In order to facilitate investigations into and analyses of financial crime and fraud involving cryptocurrencies, TRM asserts that it offers blockchain intelligence solutions to law enforcement agencies, regulatory bodies, tax authorities, and financial intelligence units around the world.mTRM’s blockchain intelligence solutions are more crucial in the “rapidly evolving regulatory landscape” of cryptocurrency, according to Christine Kang, principal at Thoma Bravo.
TRM Labs was established in 2018 and states that it has had a 490% increase in revenue year over year. Former law enforcement officers from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation division, the Australian Federal Police, INTERPOL, the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency, and the U.S. Secret Service and among others, the Treasury Department.
New users are more susceptible to scams as a result of the expansion of digital assets, especially during bull markets. As of August 2022, according to data from Chainalysis, total revenue from crypto scams was $1.6 billion, a 65% decrease over the same time last year. According to the authors of the paper, bull markets are when scams are more likely to succeed because victims are more attracted to investment opportunities and outsized rewards.
