Nasdaq Leads $20 Million Funding Round for Blockchain Startup Symbiont

Enterprise blockchain startup Symbiont has closed a $20 million Series-B funding round led by Nasdaq Ventures with participation from Galaxy Digital, Citi, Raptor Group and others.

Symbiont CEO Mark Smith told CoinDesk that the firm doubled its staff last year, and now has more than 60 employees.

As part of the investment, Nasdaq Financial Framework, a software company owned by the exchange, will integrate Symbiont's Assembly smart contracts platform to explore new avenues involving tokenization.

Smith, a veteran of the early days of financial market matching engines, explained there has been a big movement towards combining blockchain with traditional exchange technology.

"Symbiont will give Nasdaq the ability to originate a financial instrument and the smart contract to custody it on a blockchain, to allow trading to occur with their matching engine, to allow surveillance to occur across the network using Nasdaq technology and then to perform settlement on a blockchain," he said.

To be clear, Symbiont is not working with the Nasdaq proper, just the software arm, which sells tech to other exchanges, clearing houses and central securities depositories in about 50 countries.

Symbiont has kept a firm focus on building capital markets infrastructure using a proprietary blockchain and smart contracts architecture.

Symbiont dedicated a lot of time and effort between 2015 and 2017 helping create a blockchain technology-enabled regulatory environment in the state of Delaware, creating rules for share registry and the ability to create a whole new class of securities.

Symbiont has been around for as long as any of these forks, consortiums or other proprietary solutions, and Smith is never shy about sharing his opinion of them.

So what does Symbiont have to show for its work? Smith said several of its projects will enter production in 2019, starting with the Vanguard collaboration, which uses corporate action data to manage the asset manager's passive indices.