Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures leads $27 million Series A for crypto payments infrastructure firm XanPool

XanPool, a Hong Kong-based payments infrastructure firm that provides crypto on and off-ramp services, has raised $27 million in a Series A funding round.

Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures led the round. CMT Digital and Taavet Hinrikus, founder and chairman of Wise (formerly Transferwise), also participated in the round, among other investors.

XanPool describes itself as a payments network, similar to Mastercard or Visa. But instead of having a "closed" network of banks as partners, XanPool says its network is open and is made out of individuals and businesses whose idle capital is used to settle cross-currency and crypto transactions.

XanPool says its network has over $200 million of liquidity, over 400 business partners and over 500,000 users.

XanPool also bills itself as a SWIFT-like network. XanPool CEO Jeffery Liu said like SWIFT, XanPool does not hold liquidity itself and earns fees based on the communication that its software facilitates, but unlike SWIFT, XanPool is compatible with crypto.

The team is very familiar with how SWIFT works. SWIFT veteran Daniel De Weyer works for XanPool since August 2019. Weyer worked at SWIFT for nearly three decades and is currently a director of payments and banking relationships at XanPool.

XanPool currently operates in over 13 countries in the Asia Pacific region and plans to expand its business further.

The Series A round brings XanPool's total funding to date to more than $31 million. In September 2020, the firm raised $4.3 million in a pre-Series A funding round.