Crypto Anti-Money Laundering Specialist Notabene Raises $14.5M

• An important deadline looms at the end of this year for firms to comply with Europe’s update of its Transfer of Funds Regulation (TFR) to include crypto transactions.
• Notabene CEO Pelle Braendgaard believes Donald Trump will emulate what the European Commission is doing in order to bring trading volume back to the U.S.

Notabene, a startup that helps cryptocurrency trading firms comply with anti-money laundering (AML) rules, has raised $14.5 million Series B funding led by DRW Venture Capital, with participation from funds managed by Apollo, Nextblock, ParaFi Capital, and Wintermute.

Bringing crypto into line with the rest of the financial world, global AML watchdog the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has set out recommendations for regulators – known as the “Travel Rule” – that requires crypto companies like exchanges, wallet providers, and payment processors to securely exchange information about sender and receiver of transactions.

Aiming to be a kind of SWIFT for crypto transactions, Notabene’s network effect is growing with 165 companies using the platform, including some of the largest virtual asset service providers (VASPs) globally such as Copper, OKX, and Ramp.

The platform’s CEO, Pelle Braendgaard, expects an increase in transaction volume on Notabene (around $2 billion worth of daily transactions on average), as a deadline looms at the end of this year for firms to comply with Europe’s update of its Transfer of Funds Regulation (TFR) to include crypto transactions.

“EU companies will have to report if they're not getting travel information from, say, a large, unregulated offshore exchange,” Braendgaard said in an interview. “This is really pushing the industry into compliance globally. So these EU rules are not just about the EU, it's really about getting this working globally on that particular front.”

In the U.S., under the coming Donald Trump-led administration, Braendgaard believes travel rule guidance will be pushed forward more dynamically, as it was during the previous Trump administration, because it’s about bringing the industry back to America.

“If you look at what the European Commission is doing with the TFR and MiCA [the Markets in Crypto Assets regime], they want all the crypto trading to happen in the EU,” Braendgaard said. “And of course, the U.S. is going to take the same approach, I believe. Because it doesn't make sense that they're sending all of this money offshore.”

Notabene’s Series B funding round also included existing investors CMT Digital, F-Prime, Green Visor Capital, Illuminate Financial, Jump Capital, Signature Ventures, and Y Combinator.