[Updated] Temasek-backed Partior bags Series B funding from Peak XV, others

Editor’s note: This story was updated on July 12 after the company issued a press release on the funding. 

Singapore-headquartered blockchain payments network Partior on Friday announced the first close of an over $60 million Series B round led by Peak XV Partners.

Jump Trading Group and Valor Capital also participated in the financing, it said.

DealStreetAsia reported the round several hours before the announcement based on regulatory filings. Partior’s filings with Singapore’s Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA) show it has raised $35 million in fresh equity funding from Peak XV, Jump Trading and Valor Capital.

Peak XV, formerly known as Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia, contributed the most, $15 million, to the round.

Partior has so far received $25 million of the $30 million committed by the investors, its latest register of members filed with ACRA shows. Valor Capital has provided half of its $10 million commitment so far.

According to the filings, Partior has issued Series B shares worth a total of $25 million to JP Morgan, Temasek Holdings, and Standard Chartered upon conversion of notes issued last year.

The company has raised the new round at a pre-money valuation of $109.8 million, the ACRA filings show. Following the financing, Peak XV operating partner Pavel Vyhnalek will join Pavel’s board of directors.

Set up by Temasek, DBS, and JP Morgan in 2021, Partior evolved from Project Ubin, a central bank digital currency experiment backed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). Standard Chartered announced its investment in the company the following year.

Partior is a unified ledger market infrastructure that facilitates cross-border clearing and settlement. It claims to eliminate the need for manual reconciliation and ensure full value transfer and real-time visibility of transaction status.

According to estimates by the Bank of England, cross-border payment volumes are projected to exceed $250 trillion by 2027. However, industry players continue to face challenges, including settlement delays, limited transaction transparency and high operating costs.

For instance, a payment made by a corporate entity in Indonesia to another in Vietnam has to go through multiple intermediaries, incurring additional costs such as those related to foreign exchange spreads. In addition, different jurisdictions have different cut-off times, processing speeds and compliance standards that can cause further delays in the settlement process.

Partior says traditional payment infrastructures’ separation of money movement and messaging, or the payment instruction, tends to create further delays and discrepancies in reconciliation. The company addresses this by using tokenisation, which merges the transfer and the message.

It claims its unified ledger combines tokenised deposits, assets and central bank funds, offering benefits such as 24/7 clearing and settlements and simultaneous settlements with lower risks.

In May, Standard Chartered became the first Euro settlement bank to go live on Partior, expanding the latter’s network coverage beyond US dollars and Singapore dollars.

The Singapore firm also announced the appointment of its new CEO, Humphrey Valenbreder, in the same month. Valenbreder succeeded former Grab Financial executive Jason Thompson in the role.