Mirror, a “blockchain-technology” company building a new financial platform, today announced it has received $8.8 million in Series A funding led by Route 66 Ventures with participation from existing investors including RRE Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Battery Ventures and Tim Draper.
This additional capital brings the total funds raised by Mirror to $12.8 million. Pascal Bouvier, General Partner at Route 66 Ventures, will join the company’ board. Mirror is building a smart contracts platform that enables peer-to-peer trading, using bitcoin, to democratize access to financial markets.
The company leverages blockchain technology — the technology that underlies bitcoin and helps create a public, online ledger to verify transactions in digital currencies — to allow individuals and businesses to create and exchange financial contracts. Mirror’s decentralized market enables new ways to hedge economic and business risks at a fraction of the normal cost.
Avish Bhama, co-founder and CEO of Mirror, stated:
“There is an unbundling of the financial services industry that’s occurring right now, and we see an enormous opportunity to provide advanced, more efficient services for risk management and hedging. We’re building tools for traditional financial assets, leveraging the Bitcoin protocol. We plan to use this new financing to continue to build out our engineering team and scale international operations.”
The company, formerly known as Vaurum, launched a trading service in 2014 and rebranded late last year as it evolved its focus to ‘smart’ financial contracts that democratize access to the traditional financial system.