Many cryptocurrency issuers struggle with liquidity issues that affect their secondary market sales. Flowdesk’s flagship Market-Making-as-a-Service (MMaaS) solves this by letting token issuers manage their liquidity using their funds and strategies. This reduces market volatility and creates smoother trading on centralised (CEX) and decentralised exchanges (DEX).
Flowdesk, a full-service digital asset trading and technology firm, has secured $102M — $91.8 million in equity and $10.2 million in debt – in new financing. The round combines equity funding from HV Capital and existing investors Eurazeo, Cathay Innovation, and ISAI, plus debt financing from BlackRock-managed funds and accounts. This raises Flowdesk’s total funding to $122M.
This new capital will cement Flowdesk’s role as a leading digital asset trading and technology provider. The funding will support global expansion and address the growing demand for liquidity provision and OTC trading solutions. It will also help scale derivatives operations and launch a dedicated crypto credit desk to serve evolving market needs.
The firm will invest substantially in its proprietary trading systems while doubling its workforce to strengthen its liquidity provision and OTC trading position. Flowdesk will also bolster its compliance and legal frameworks to meet emerging regulatory standards, particularly MICA. The company plans to expand globally, focusing primarily on the UAE for its Middle East operations.
How Flowdesk addresses the crypto gap
Flowdesk was founded in April 2020 by Guilhem Chaumont, Paul Bugnot, François Cluzeau, and Balthazar Giraux in Paris, France. The founders combined their expertise in banking, algorithmic trading, engineering, and entrepreneurship to tackle the challenges of fragmented marketplaces and liquidity issues in the cryptocurrency sector.
The founders identified key challenges in the crypto market: siloed marketplaces and technical barriers that prevent efficient liquidity management for crypto-asset projects. Their goal was to build infrastructure that could connect exchanges, provide scalability, and support the needs of token issuers and institutions in the growing digital asset ecosystem.
“Our mission is to build institutional-grade trading solutions for the digital asset ecosystem. We are grateful to have partners and our existing investors backing our ambitious growth plans,” said Guilhem Chaumont, Global CEO of Flowdesk. “Tokenization has the potential to transform capital markets on a global scale. This partnership will allow us to continue pursuing our quest to make digital assets accessible to a wider range of institutionalised counterparties.”
Flowdesk aims to transform the crypto-financial industry by offering institutional-grade trading solutions across the digital asset ecosystem. The company empowers token issuers, exchanges, and institutions with advanced technologies for efficient liquidity management, transparent trading strategies, and seamless blockchain integration. Flowdesk envisions a future where financial services are redefined to accommodate tokenised assets globally.
Behind the platform: differentiated approach to liquidity provision
Flowdesk pioneered MMaaS, enabling clients to manage their liquidity using Flowdesk’s advanced trading infrastructure while maintaining control over their funds and strategies. This approach differs from traditional market makers, who typically take full control of liquidity management.
Flowdesk operates a high-performance trading platform with over 140 centralised and decentralised exchanges. It executes over 1 million orders daily with sub-millisecond latency, ensuring efficiency and reliability. The platform processes billions of data points daily using Google Cloud’s BigQuery and Redis Enterprise, enabling seamless scaling without compromising latency or uptime (99.9% reliability).
Clients benefit from live dashboards and real-time reporting, providing full visibility into trading activities and liquidity management. This transparency sets Flowdesk apart in the crypto space. The company is registered as a Digital Asset Service Provider with the French AMF (Autorité des Marchés Financiers), ensuring compliance with evolving financial regulations.
Using Redis’ Active-Active databases, Flowdesk ensures high availability and low latency by distributing data across regions like Japan, Europe, and the U.S., improving performance for global clients.
Unlike traditional market makers who dictate liquidity strategies, Flowdesk lets clients define their own strategies while using its infrastructure. The company emphasizes non-custodial solutions, giving clients control over their tokens, and appeals to projects prioritizing security and autonomy. Its cutting-edge tools like Kubernetes, Redis Enterprise, and BigQuery enable superior scalability, low latency, and cost-efficiency.
Beyond centralised exchanges, Flowdesk actively supports decentralised finance (DeFi) projects by deploying capital and fostering ecosystem growth. The company offers comprehensive services, including custody solutions, brokerage services, OTC trading, and treasury management, making it a one-stop shop for digital asset issuers.
“Guilhem and the entire Flowdesk team have done a tremendous job creating a hyper-growing, profitable, FinTech powerhouse within the vastly expanding digital asset space. Offering their clients the relevant infrastructure while complementarily adding OTC products and proprietary trading is brilliant. We are proud to have partnered with such a capable, experienced and smart founder and management team and strongly believe in Flowdesk as global FinTech Champion,” said Alexander Joel-Carbonell, Partner at HV Capital.”Flowdesk is witnessing strong growth on the back of its successful offering. The company’s financial services platform and its innovative Market-Making as a Service business model is improving transparency and liquidity and sets high standards of practices in the fast-growing digital assets industry. This is fundamental for unlocking the long-term market potential of an emerging ecosystem and asset class,” said Mårten Vading, Managing Director, co-Head of BlackRock Growth Debt.
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