- Fireblocks is a company that is working on eliminating the root cause of digital asset hacks and scams.
- Recently Fireblocks announced it launched out of stealth and raised $16 million in Series A
Did you know that more than $3 billion in digital assets were stolen by hackers in the last 18 months due to private key theft, spoofing, and compromised credentials? For example, Binance — the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world — lost $40 million in Bitcoin due to an insecure hot wallet and compromised API credentials. This is a problem that Fireblocks is working on solving by eliminating the root cause of digital asset hacks and scams.
Fireblocks, an enterprise platform company that secures digital assets in transit, announced recently that it launched out of stealth mode and the company raised $16 million in Series A funding from Cyberstarts, Tenaya Capital, Eight Roads (the investment arm of Fidelity International), Swisscom Ventures and MState.
Some of Fireblocks’ customers include the largest institutional digital asset trading operators such as Galaxy Digital (led by CEO Mike Novogratz), Digital Currency Group (owned by Barry Silbert), and Genesis Global Trading. These customers use the Fireblocks platform for safeguarding digital assets in its portfolio as it moved across exchanges, OTCs, counterparties, hot wallets, and custodians. And Fireblocks is currently integrated with 15 digital asset exchanges and offers support for over 180 cryptocurrencies, tokens, and, stablecoins.
Fireblocks was founded by Idan Ofrat, Michael Shaulov, and Pavel Berengoltz. Shaulov and Berengoltz sold their previous company Lacoon Mobile Security to Check Point. And Ofrat was previously the VP of R&D and C4 Security (acquired by Elbit Systems).
“While Blockchain based assets by themselves are cryptographically secure, moving digital assets is a nightmare. After interviewing over 100 institutional customers, including hedge funds, broker-dealers, exchanges, and banks, we concluded that the current process is slow and highly susceptible to cyber attacks and human errors,” said Fireblocks CEO and co-founder Michael Shaulov. “We built a platform that secures the process and simplifies the movement of funds into one or two steps.”
Fireblocks is run by top security engineers from Symantec, Trusteer, IBM security, and includes Prof. Ran Canetti — who is a leading cryptography advisor.
“Moving digital assets 24/7, across the globe, uninterrupted, while meeting all enterprise security requirements is industry changing,” added Galaxy Digital CISCO Ivan Brightly.” For digital asset trading operators, the Fireblocks platform provides a robust security system for digital assets, whether stored or in transit.
Fireblocks is also introducing the first patent-pending Secure Transfer Environment that works with a Hot Vault system. Combined, it enables digital assets to be easily transitioned from any storage solution to be primed for immediate settlement and transfer on the blockchain.
“Sitting as part of the broader Fidelity group, we realize that cybersecurity is crucial in the adoption of blockchain and digital assets,” explained Eight Roads Ventures Europe partner and head Davor Hebel. “We are excited to support the Fireblocks team as it develops a cutting edge technology that will help propel digital assets trading to the next level of evolution, enabling huge improvements in operational efficiencies, security, and trust.”
Shaulov told Forbes that he was inspired to launch Fireblocks after he helped investigate North Korean hackers that stole over $500 million worth of cryptocurrencies in 2017 and 2018 while leading Check Point’s cloud security team. During that process, Shaulov took a multilayered approach for securing crypto transactions and kept assets stored in users’ wallets safe while also protecting assets in transit by eliminating the need for login credentials and deposit addresses. Often times, middlemen took advantage of swapping out legitimate addresses with ones that belong to a hacker instead.
“Securing Blockchain based assets is one of the key challenges in modern Cybersecurity warfare, and it requires heterogeneous expertise in mathematics, system level programming and years of hands-on Cybersecurity experience,” noted Gili Raanan — who is a Partner at Cyberstarts and Sequoia Capital. “The Cyberstarts team is thrilled to partner with Michael, Idan & Pavel, who amazed us with their technology breakthrough to eliminate risk from digital assets management.”
In terms of revenue, Fireblocks is in a “good area” of 6 figures as it is getting closer to hitting $1 million in revenue. The company has 16 employees and its engineering team is based in Tel Aviv while the sales and marketing team is based in New York.
