Canadian-founded TransCrypts has secured $15 million USD ($20.9 million CAD) in seed funding to expand its blockchain-based record-keeping and verification platform.
The all-equity round was led by Silicon Valley-based blockchain investor Pantera Capital, with participation from Lightspeed Faction, Alpha Edison, Motley Fool Ventures, California Innovation Fund, and Gusto co-founder Tomer London.
Some of the stars behind TransCrypts’ 2023 pre-seed round also returned to re-up their investment, including Shark Tank’s Mark Cuban, Techstars, Alumni Ventures, Protocol Labs, Apertu Capital, Informed Ventures, Asymmetry Ventures, and The Atland Fund. TransCrypts CEO Zain Zaidi told BetaKit that the round valued the company at over $80 million CAD.
The new funding will help the startup formally expand beyond employment credentials to support educational and health records.
TransCrypts was founded in 2020 out of the University of Toronto Scarborough’s incubator program, The Hub, by Zaidi and his cousin, Ali Zaheer. Its API-enabled platform encrypts files, primarily employment records, and stores them on a blockchain. TransCrypts previously launched its platform in Ukraine and Turkey to let hospitals and refugees upload, access, and share medical records despite war and earthquakes.
The company claims its records-management platform helps users maintain full control over their personal information and verify legitimacy in an era of AI-driven fraud and digital misrepresentation.
The new funding will help the startup formally expand beyond employment credentials to support educational and health records in the United States and Canada next year. While its medical record platform is live in nine countries, the startup recently secured certification under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the US.
Zaidi said TransCrypts doesn’t have many issues holding sensitive documents like health records, since consumers completely own their end-to-end encrypted records. He added that the company itself can’t even see the contents.
“We view ourselves like the post office,” Zaid told BetaKit. “We simply take the sealed enveloped from the issuer and hand it to the consumer, and then take the sealed envelope from the consumer and share it with whoever the consumer wants.”
The company, which is dual-headquartered between San Francisco and Toronto, also plans to more than double its team in the next year, with a particular focus on its Canadian operations. Zaidi said 11 employees from the 18-person team are based in Canada.
In 2023, TransCrypts said it was making $70,000 in revenue per month and facilitating more than one million employment and income verification documents for 140 different enterprises. The company claims it now supports over 4 million users across its more than 450 enterprise customers, including companies in the Fortune 100 and Fortune 500. Zaidi told BetaKit that TransCrypts made over $500,000 in revenue last month.
Feature image courtesy TransCrypts.