Strix Leviathan, a technology startup solving complexities in cryptocurrency trading and management for enterprises and institutions, has closed a $1.625 million seed round of financing led by Liquid 2 Ventures and supported by Founders' Co-op, Future\Perfect Ventures and 9Mile Labs. The round also includes prominent Seattle and San Francisco Bay Area angel investors with backgrounds in cryptocurrency, big data and software platforms, including Chris McCoy, Doug Baldwin Jr., Kirby Winfield and Steve Hall.

Product Development
Strix Leviathan is building an institutional-grade cryptocurrency investment management platform with a unified API that facilitates trade execution across a diverse set of existing cryptocurrency exchanges. Core features include:

Data Ingestion Engine-The company's technology pulls data from a set of diverse sources including an array of cryptocurrency exchanges. These include live order data, order books and sentiment. The process then abstracts away the nuanced differences across each source, resulting in normalized data sets that are useful for customers who need a data feed for, among other purposes, testing trading strategies.


Algorithmic Trading Strategies-The company applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to develop proprietary algorithmic trading strategies available to license. These strategies are optimized to volatile market conditions that are the new norm in cryptocurrency markets.


Order Gateway-The Strix Leviathan Order Gateway is a trade execution engine with features to handle the immaturity and unreliable nature of today's cryptocurrency exchange APIs. The Gateway is designed to provide a unified API for trading on multiple exchanges, opening access to liquidity pools. This is ideal for enterprise customers that already have trade algorithms and simply need an efficient, powerful platform for placing trades.

Team
The company's team of technologists and data scientists are applying decades of applied mathematics, computing and cloud infrastructure knowledge. Seattle entrepreneur Jesse Proudman leads the company as founder and CEO. Prior to Strix Leviathan, he founded Blue Box, a cloud computing startup, which was acquired by IBM in 2015. Proudman has assembled a team of experts in cryptocurrency, statistical modeling, data science, infrastructure, operations and entrepreneurship. With experience from Pitchbook, GitHub, CERN, Blue Box and IBM, the team is well positioned to capitalize on this opportunity.

Supporting Quotes
"Many Institutional investors have struggled to figure out the best path of entry into cryptocurrency markets due to the inherent complexities of the space," said Proudman. "We're squarely focused on solving trading and management of cryptocurrencies for these institutions and enterprises. Considering the thousands of individual trading pairs, the plethora of exchanges and the immaturity of cryptocurrency markets, these investors desperately need a platform to simplify their trading initiatives. The markets are ready for an offering like ours and we're excited to bring it to them."

"I've seen the birth of PCs, the internet and mobile," said Joe Montana, managing director, Liquid 2 Ventures. "It's early, but I think crypto may be the next revolution. Unfortunately, it's also full of scams. Right now the key is to find the right team that is doing something new and to trust them. We've known Jesse for years. He's proven himself to be trustworthy and adaptive in fast paced markets. Strix should be huge."

"I spent the second half of 2017 learning everything that I could about crypto markets and concluded that the market was devoid of quantitative analysis and algorithms," said Mike Miller, general partner, Liquid 2 Ventures. "Wall Street has taught us that quants win, so if 2017 was the year of the ICO, 2018 will be the year of the quant. Jesse has built the right team to turn quantitative models into algorithms and run them at production scale."

"We are seeing the institutionalization of the cryptocurrency market; yet, tools for trading and analysis have yet to be built," said Jalak Jobanputra, founding partner, Future\Perfect Ventures. "Strix Leviathan has assembled a strong team to address the current inefficiencies and is well positioned to be a market leader as the overall market grows."

Learn more about Strix Leviathan at strixleviathan.com.