Anchorage Digital, co-founded and chaired by the Técnico alumnus of Telecommunications and Informatics Engineering, Diogo Mónica, has raised a $350 million (about €309 million) series D funding round. This round of financing values Anchorage at over $3 billion (about €2.7 billion), thus reaching the unicorn status (company valued at more than $1 billion).

According to a statement released today by the company, the round was led by global investment firm KKR. Participants include Andreessen Horowitz, Wellington Management, Apollo credit funds, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Blockchain Capital, Delta Blockchain Fund, Elad Gil, GIC, GoldenTree Asset Management, Innovius Capital, Kraken, Lux Capital, PayPal Ventures, Senator Investment Group, Standard Investments and Thoma Bravo.

“We are at an inflection point as more and more institutions look to add crypto services into their offerings. This funding positions Anchorage to meet the unprecedented institutional demand for this rapidly changing market”, Diogo Mónica stresses in a statement.

The company will use this investment to enhance Anchorage’s ability to provide custom crypto infrastructure solutions for global financial services and fintech clients, to accelerate Anchorage’s ability to enable institutions to navigate the latest trends in crypto and to increase the size of the team to continue expanding product offerings.

Diogo Mónica is a Portuguese-American. He was born in California, but three years later he moved to Portugal. He got his degree (Telecommunications and Informatics Engineering) and PhD (Computer Science) from Instituto Superior Técnico.

He moved to the United States to work at Square where he led the platform security team and met Nathan McCauley, who later would become his business partner at Anchorage. At Square, they developed a software that now guarantees more than $100 billion in annual transactions. In 2017, and after working at Docker, the two friends decided to found Anchorage.

Founded to meet the growing need for institutional custody that lets investors safely hold and use crypto, Anchorage has grown into a full-service financial platform and infrastructure provider for the digital asset space.

In 2018, Talkdesk, co-founded by the Técnico alumni Cristina Fonseca and Tiago Paiva, became Portugal’s 3rd unicorn.