- Blockchain-based platform company Spring Labs announced it raised $23 million in Series A funding
- This round of funding was led by GreatPoint Ventures with significant participation from existing investors, including August Capital, General Motors Ventures, RRE Ventures, Galaxy Digital, Multicoin Capital, The Pritzker Group, and CardWorks.
Spring Labs — the company behind the blockchain-based platform designed for transforming how information and data are shared globally called Spring Protocol — recently raised $23 million in Series A funding. This round of funding was led by GreatPoint Ventures. There was also significant participation from existing investors, including August Capital, General Motors Ventures (corporate venture capital arm of General Motors), RRE Ventures, Galaxy Digital, Multicoin Capital, The Pritzker Group, and CardWorks.
“We’re pleased to announce our Series A with strong participation from existing and new strategic investors, enabling us to accelerate the development of new products as well as the Spring Protocol itself,” said Spring Labs CEO and co-founder Adam Jiwan. “Additionally, we’re excited to expand our relationship with GM Financial, which has demonstrated its commitment to innovation and collaboration over the past year, playing an active role in the evaluation of products and use cases on the Spring Protocol.”
What does Spring Labs do? As other forms of credit mature and evolve like the adoption of chip-enabled credit cards, auto financing fraud has become a path of less resistance as it increased by a rate of nearly 5 times from 2011 to 2018. And fraud-related losses in auto-lending costs the industry between $4 and $6 billion dollars per year with a major portion of that fraud resulting from the abundance of synthetic identities — which is a form of fraud where identity thieves establish credit accounts using a mix of genuine and fake customer information such as a real customer’s name with a fake address.
Due to these issues, the first products being built on the blockchain-based Spring Protocol are Spring Verify (enhanced identity verification), Spring Defense (fraud monitoring and mitigation), and Spring Protect (loan stacking prevention). These products are being designed for improving customer on-boarding processes by reducing costs while improving data availability, security, and granularity. And the products will deliver valuable anonymous data to lenders in a variety of verticals, including unsecured consumer lending, small business lending, credit card issuance, secured auto lending, etc.
Through the GM Ventures investment, GM Financial is joining more than 20 other leading financial services institutions in co-developing the first applications to be built on the Spring Protocol —which is part of the automotive company’s continued effort for better serving and protecting customers and dealers.
“GM Financial is excited to deepen its relationship with Spring Labs, and we look forward to the launch of the Spring products as we believe they have the potential to better protect our customers from fraudulent activity,” added GM Financial Chief Strategy Officer Michael Kanarios.
Along with the funding announcement, Spring Labs revealed that it hired Joel Eckhause (former CRO and COO of Renew Financial) as the company’s first COO and David Kravitz (former long-time cybersecurity advisor with the NSA) as the Director of Research. And in conjunction with this funding round, GreatPoint Ventures founder and managing partner Andrew Perlman is joining the company’s Board of Directors.
“Spring Labs has assembled a world-class team and developed highly innovative technology that has the potential to transform how information is shared not only within financial services but also in a host of other industries,” said Perlman. “We have observed the company’s development since inception and are thrilled to lead this investment round.”
