HK-based Amber, which offers crypto trading services like arbitrage, market making, and lending to institutional investors, raises $28M at a $100M valuation
Jeff Kauflin / Forbes :
Context & Ripple Effects
This $28M round is the seed of what became one of Asia's most closely watched crypto-finance arcs: within sixteen months Amber converted institutional arbitrage, market making, and lending into a $1B Series B, then a Temasek-led extension at $3B in early 2022.
The later coverage is what makes this early raise worth rereading — by December 2022 Amber had raised $300M at a discount to that $3B mark, so the 2020 valuation sits at the base of both the ascent and the repricing.
First-order effects
- Amber gets the balance sheet to scale lending and market making for institutional clients, moving from a Hong Kong startup to a full-service counterparty for funds trading digital assets.
Second-order effects
- Capital chases the same playbook across Asia: Babel Finance raises an $80M Series B at a $2B valuation months later, and data vendors like Amberdata ($30M Series B) build the institutional plumbing these trading desks depend on.
Third-order effects
- When the leverage behind this model unwinds, valuations reset faster than they were built — Amber's own down round shows how quickly a $3B institutional trading franchise reprices — while Hong Kong's market reorganizes around licensed venues like HashKey, now filing for an IPO of up to ~$215M.
The trend: Institutional crypto trading platforms rode the 2020–2021 bull market from nine-figure to multi-billion-dollar valuations, then repriced sharply when leverage unwound, leaving licensed Hong Kong exchanges to anchor the next phase.