Goldman Sachs Leads $25 Million Funding Round for Blockchain Payments Startup Veem | Crypto

U.S.-based banking giant Goldman Sachs has led a $25 million strategic funding round for blockchain payments startup Veem, with participation also confirmed to Cointelegraph from Silicon Valley Bank on September 27.

Veem, which utilizes digital ledger technology to increase the efficiency of small business payments, noted in their press release that the funding round also received participation from GV (formerly Google Ventures), Trend Forward Capital, Extol Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and Pantera Capital, among others investors.

Forbes notes that Goldman Sachs invested through its Principal Strategic Investment Group, and that Rana Yared, a Goldman Sachs managing directors, will sit on Veem’s board as a non-voting observer.

With this latest funding round, Veem plans to develop new partner integrations, as well as “rely on increased automation, including built-in anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer compliance,” Forbes reports.

Veem uses Bitcoin (BTC) to connect its clients’ bank accounts with suppliers, processing more than half of its transactions with the cryptocurrency as a substitute for correspondents. The blockchain startup previously concluded a $26 million Series B funding round in March. According to the press release, Veem now serves 80,000 small businesses in 96 countries.

Back in August, Axoni, an enterprise-focused blockchain startup, had raised $32 million in Series B funding round that had also been led by Goldman Sachs.

Goldman Sachs had recently been rumored to have abandoned unconfirmed plans to start its own cryptocurrency trading desk, reports that Goldman Sachs’ CFO denied in early September:

“When we talked about exploring digital assets […] it was going to be exploration that would be evolving over time. Maybe someone who was thinking about our activities here got very excited that we would be making markets as principal and physical Bitcoin, and as they got into it they realized part of the evolution, but it’s not here yet.”