Crypto infrastructure companies were all the rage during the last crypto bear market in 2022 and 2023. Investors threw millions at startups that promised to make the development of crypto applications less clunky and more user-friendly. While some firms have quietly closed up shop, others have now matured—and are raking in new rounds of capital. That includes New York-based Turnkey.
Founded in 2022, Turnkey creates low-level infrastructure for digital wallets where users store and manage their cryptocurrency. On Monday, the startup announced that it had raised $30 million in a Series B funding round led by Bain Capital Crypto. Other investors included Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Faction, Galaxy Ventures, Wintermute, and Variant.
CEO and cofounder Bryce Ferguson said Turnkey’s appeal lies in its ability to add and streamline advanced features to wallets.
“We’re moving from this world of these slow, clunky systems that were designed for buying and holding crypto to very high throughput, machine-based transactions,” he added.
Like many crypto startup founders, Ferguson and his cofounder, Jack Kearney, are alumni of Coinbase, the U.S.’s largest crypto exchange, and worked at the company’s division dedicated to holding assets for big institutional investors, like Bitcoin.
After Ferguson left Coinbase in 2021 and started a job as leader of the crypto division of Trade Republic, a broker based out of Berlin, he realized there were “a lot of rough edges” around the infrastructure that companies use to hold their crypto.
So, he teamed up with his former colleague Kearney, who was then working for the vaunted crypto VC Polychain, to launch Turnkey. The company offers APIs, or application programming interfaces, where developers can plug into the startup’s software to easily create and manage crypto wallets for their users. Many well-known firms in the crypto industry use Turnkey’s product, including the prediction market platform Polymarket, the NFT marketplace Magic Eden, and Bridge, the stablecoin startup recently acquired by fintech giant Stripe.
The startup’s competitors include crypto infrastructure companies like Fireblocks as well as Privy, another company that lets companies easily create and manage users’ crypto wallets. Still, Ferguson says business is booming. Over the past year, the number of transactions it’s processed has increased 200 times over. And while his startup is not in the black, it does “have a clear path to profitability,” he said.
Investors in the round received stock as well as token warrants, or promised allocations of a yet-be-released cryptocurrency. Ferguson, however, said his startup has no plans to launch its own cryptocurrency and the warrants are common additions to most crypto deals.
He and his cofounder plan to use the new injection of cash to grow his staff of currently 35 employees, especially his engineering team.
“Most of the UX [user experience] challenges that people have talked about over the past five years in crypto have been solved,” he said. “Ultimately, the building blocks are there.”
