Safeheron is a self-custody service for small-to medium-sized enterprises in the web3 space. It announced that it closed a $7M pre-Series B round.
According to Friday’s news release, Yunqi Partners, an early-stage VC firm, and Web3Vision, a hybrid venture and hedge fund are co-leading the round. Waterdrip Capital, PrimeBlock Ventures, and M77 Ventures are other investors.
Safeheron, a Singapore-based company, was founded by Max He, Wade Wang and Bruce Wang in 2019. A group of tech industry giants formed the founding team, with Bruce having worked for years in technical teams at Tencent as well as Alibaba. Wade also played a key role in the creation Damai.com, China’s largest concert ticketing ecommerce platform.
Safeheron’s technical expertise helped create a solution for crypto-native small-to medium businesses to adopt institutional-grade self-custody security.
Self-custody allows users to take full control over their digital assets. Crypto wallets are used to manage this. They store addresses on the blockchain and manage sending and receiving assets.
Safeheron uses multi-party computation and a trusted execution area (TEE), to increase custody security per the release.
MPC allows multiple devices to validate transactions, eliminating the possibility of a single point failure. TEE allows code to be executed within the processor’s safe area.
MetaMask Partnering
According to the release, MetaMask, a software cryptocurrency wallet, is teaming up with Safeheron in order to use its MPC technology for multi-factor authentication.
MPC is first to be integrated into MetaMask Snapchats system. This allows developers to expand the capabilities and flexibility of MetaMask in order for them decentralized apps.
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According to the release, MetaMask users can now use two to three verification devices to sign transactions. According to the release, the devices supported at the moment are the Keystone desktop wallet, MetaMask extension, and MetaMask smartphone.
Raising a preSeries A
According to a spokesperson, Safeheron’s preSeries A funding is an addition to its existing seed funding. Safeheron has a total funding of $9 million.
The funds are used to enhance the technology and infrastructure, as well as expand Safeheron’s international presence, stated Bruce Wang, cofounder and CTO at Safeheron.
Yu Chen, Yunqi Partners partner, stated that custody security providers often compete to secure enterprise clients and shun SMEs with expensive solutions. “So, we are excited to support Safeheron, who makes the protection of crypto assets more accessible .”
This partnership announcement and fundraising round comes at a time when the crypto industry is dealing with security breaches in wallets. For example, the Harmony blockchain lost $100 million after a hacker stole control of its multi-signature wallet that was linked to Ethereum bridge.
