Toronto FinTech startup Delphia closed a $75.2 million CAD ($60 million USD) all equity Series A funding round in April to tap into cryptocurrencies.
The financing, which comprises all primary capital, was led by crypto fund Multicoin Capital with participation from Ribbit Capital, FTX Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, FJ Labs, Lattice Ventures, Cumberland, Thomas Bailey from Road Capital, and M13.
“We believe data is the internet’s natural medium of exchange, we want it to be community-owned.”
– Andrew Peek
Delphia’s previous funding rounds include a $4 million pre-seed round in 2018 and $15.3 million in seed funding in 2019.
Spun out of public opinion research company Vox Pop Labs in 2018, Delphia provides an AI-driven investment platform that it touts as a way to forecast the growth and profitability of publicly-traded companies, up to seven quarters into the future.
Delphia offers its platform at no cost through its app, but also provides investment opportunities for accredited investors, which are charged fees. The collected fees are used to help reward its data-providing users.
Designed by a team of academics, data scientists, and engineers, Delphia is expanding its “share-to-earn” model that rewards its users for contributing their own data.
Leveraging user-owned data has been a key component in Delphia’s investment platform since it was first rolled out in 2019. Right now, data-contributing users get weekly chances to win cash.
In the next few months, cash will become one of two options, as Delphia expands to rewarding users with tokens. According to TechCrunch, that token reward model will function as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) for which votes will be tied to Delphia’s ERC-20 token – a standard used for creating and issuing smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain that allow for the creation of tokenized assets that people can invest in.
Delphia’s overall aim is to level the playing field between institutional and retail investors through its use of consumer spending insights, employment patterns, and public opinion data from social media to deliver algorithmic models that the company claimed were previously exclusive to top-performing hedge funds.
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“We believe data is the internet’s natural medium of exchange, we want it to be community-owned (hence a DAO) and that data will need a wrapper (token) if it is going to be allocated effectively,” Andrew Peek, CEO of Delphia, told BetaKit.
Backed by over $70 million CAD in new capital, Delphia is set to launch its token rewards program and expand its global headcount. Per its LinkedIn page, Delphia has an employee base of around 58 across its headquarters in Toronto, New York, San Francisco, and London.
Peek told BetaKit that Delphia is building out new product teams with a “significant amount” of new crypto-related hires. including a few new product teams.
Featured image courtesy of Delphia.
