Ripple successfully obtained $55 million in Series B financing and signed contracts with several banking giants

On the evening of September 15th, Beijing time, distributed ledger settlement startup Ripple announced the completion of a US$55 million Series B financing round. The lead investors include Standard Chartered Bank, Accenture Ventures, Standard Chartered Digital Ventures, Siam Commercial Bank and the venture capital department of SBI Holdings. Other investors include Santander InnoVentures, CME Venture, Seagate Technology and Venture 51.

Ripple President and COO Brad Garlinghouse told reporters:

“This investment strengthens our balance sheet and allows us to think about acquisitions. There are a lot of smaller companies doing interesting things. In the short term, we may not be interested, but looking ahead, we may be.”

As of now, Ripple has received a total of 9300万美元in venture capital. Early investors include Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, IDG Capital Partners and Jerry Young's AME Cloud Ventures. The latest financing also makes Ripple one of the most funded blockchain companies.

Ripple was founded in 2012, at a time when most startups in the industry were focused on the Bitcoin protocol.

However, Ripple (then called OpenCoin) chose to take a different path. Unlike Bitcoin, Ripple's consensus ledger requires permission, which means that banks do not have to worry about anonymous entities verifying transactions. In addition, Ripple's distributed ledger products and services do not require its native token XRP (Ripple coin).

Success did not happen overnight. It took Ripple nearly a year to win its first customer (German Internet bank Fidor). Four months later, the company signed two US banks, and six months later, more than a dozen banks reached deals with Ripple.

But Garlinghouse said the raft of new clients announced today was largely due to last year's Sibos banking conference.

“It’s one of our biggest expenses,” he said, “but it’s also the one that gives us the best return on investment.”

Growing number of banking partners

In addition to today’s funding news, Ripple also announced that a number of major banks will officially join its network, including: Standard Chartered Bank, Westpac Banking Corporation, National Australia Bank (NAB), Mizuho Financial Group (MHFG), BMO Financial Group, Siam Commercial Bank and Shanghai Huarui Bank.

According to the company, while various financial institutions have successfully transferred actual funds to the Ripple network, the banks are currently building their own commercial products.

As an example, Garlinghouse said that Chinese private bank Shanghai Huarui is working with Ripple to build a new commercial cross-border payments service, which aims to allow the bank’s customer base to make international remittances in real time.

Overall, the Ripple network now includes 15 global banks, 10 of which are already in the commercial transaction phase, and the company claims to have established 30 pilot projects.

The company's scale has grown explosively

According to Garlinghouse, Ripple is scaling faster as these new banks sign on.

Currently, the company has about 150 employees and is recruiting another 25 people.

More than 50% of Ripple's hires in the past quarter were engineers, and Garlinghouse estimates that the company's compliance department has more members than any of its competitors. "Banks need that support," he said.

It is reported that Ripple will move out of its headquarters in San Francisco within the next six months, and the new headquarters will be twice the size of the current headquarters.