Goldman Sachs Heads $25 Million Investment Round in Blockchain Startup Veem

The San Francisco blockchain payment provider Veem has raised $25 million in a funding round led by multinational bank giant Goldman Sachs, the startup announced on Wednesday. Veem will use the money to expand its services with a focus on seamless transactions for small enterprises.

Google’s venture company GV, Silicon Valley Bank, Extol Capital, Trend Forward Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and Pantera Capital have also backed Veem.

Goldman Sach’s leading role is the most significant participation in the funding, as this is the latest move in a series of crypto and DLT investments by the US bank since David Solomon became the Sachs new CEO. Solomon is considered “crypto-friendlier” than his long-running predecessor Lloyd Blankfein.

“We’re thrilled to have Goldman Sachs lead our investment round. This funding will help us expand our footprint, increase our distribution and form new strategic partnerships,” Marwan Forzley, CEO and founder of Veem said in a statement.

Sachs invested in Veem through its Principal Strategic Investment Group that has backed several distributed ledger technology (DLT) projects in the previous months. The bank’s managing director Rana Yared will be elected as a non-voting observer on the Veem board of directors, according to US media publications.

“Around the world, small business owners are forced to deal with a slow, outdated, and expensive wire transfer system to send and receive international payments. SWIFT, a 40-year-old technology, consistently slaps small businesses with fees, loses payments, and lacks the transparency necessary to ensure reliability and security,” Veem explained.

Veem was established in 2014 by Forzley, the founder of eBillme(now WU Pay), an online payment service acquired by Western Union in 2011. Veem has 86,000 partners in 96 countries. It is one of the first companies on a global level to make use of the underpinning technology of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) for international transactions.

In recent years, various projects have implemented DLT-based solutions for cross-border payments as a way to cut cost, bring transparency, and faster transactions.