Daml smart contract language creator raises $120M in Series D financing

Digital Asset, the creator of the Daml smart contract programming language, has secured $120 million in Series D financing from investors 7Ridge and Eldridge, setting the stage for continued expansion of the blockchain and data infrastructure company.

The impressive funding round follows a year of significant growth for Digital Asset. The company tripled its customer base in 2020, with 50% of new business coming from non-blockchain domains, according to Emnet Rios, Digital Asset’s chief financial and operating officer. He explained:

“We saw significant demand for Daml to solve internal challenges of data silos within an organization. As a result, we expanded our product portfolio to support 10 different underlying ledgers, including traditional databases.”

Digital Asset plans to use the funds to expand its team and enhance its interoperability protocol across blockchains and traditional databases.

The latest financing round follows a $45 million Series C funding campaign in 2020 that was led by Salesforce, Samsung and VMWare. Digital Asset is backed by several high-profile companies, including IBM, JPMorgan Chase, Accenture and Goldman Sachs, among others.

Daml, which stands for "Digital Asset Modeling Language," is a programming language that enables developers to build full-stack, distributed applications for blockchains and databases. Daml became a freely available open-source programming language in April 2019. Since then, it has been adopted by several major organizations.

As Cointelegraph reported in September 2020, Daml is being deployed by China’s Blockchain-based Service Network as it pursues decentralized applications. In July 2020, Daml became fully integrated with Corda Enterprise, the commercial blockchain platform of R3. Daml was also the basis for a digital bond offering from Singapore Exchange, a major holding company in the tiny city-state of SIngapore, in September 2020.