The financing round - which brings Axoni’s total funding to date above $55 million - also included participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Citi, Coatue Management, Digital Currency Group, F-Prime Capital, Franklin Templeton Investments, JPMorgan, NEX Group, Wells Fargo, and Y Combinator.

Founded in 2013, Axoni has generated significant interest from financial heavyweights in its AxCore distributed ledger platform and smart contract language AxLang.

Goldman Sachs MD Ashwin Gupta says: “Axoni has established itself as a market leader in enterprise blockchain, delivering solutions that can be used at scale across financial markets."

In November last year the firm completed a month-long pilot that used blockchain smart contracts to manage equity swap transactions and post-trade lifecycle events for major swaps market participants.

Icap, which already holds a stake in Axoni through its Euclid startup fund, has used the firm's technology to create a private, peer-to-peer, distributed ledger network for the execution of spot/forward foreign exchange block trades.

Axoni says it will use the latest round of financing to expand its suite of infrastructure products to support mission-critical deployments of AxCore, and support the ongoing development of AxLang.

C. Thomas Richardson, head of Market Structure and Electronic Trading Services at Wells Fargo Securities, says: “The adoption of distributed ledger protocols in capital markets resembles the early days of adopting TCP/IP for distributed enterprise applications. We continue to be impressed with Axoni’s ability to facilitate such adoption by identifying use cases that could benefit from blockchain technology.”