skew. Raises $5M to Become the Bloomberg Terminal of Crypto Derivatives
April 15, 2024
skew., the London-based cryptocurrency derivatives analytics platform, has raised $5 million in a funding round led by Octopus Ventures, with participation from Digital Currency Group, Firstminute Capital, and other investors. The capital will be used to expand the platform's data coverage, develop its skewTrading execution service, and build out the team as the company pursues its ambition to provide institutional-grade market intelligence for the digital assets ecosystem.
skew. was founded to solve a problem that anyone working professionally in cryptocurrency markets encountered daily: the absence of the kind of comprehensive, real-time market data infrastructure that had long been standard in traditional financial markets. Equity and fixed income traders had Bloomberg terminals, options traders had dedicated analytics suites, and derivatives desks had purpose-built tools for understanding the shape of implied volatility surfaces and the flow of positioning across the market. Cryptocurrency derivatives — a market that had grown explosively in the years following Bitcoin's emergence as an asset class — had no equivalent. Data was fragmented across dozens of exchanges, normalisation was inconsistent, and real-time analytics simply did not exist in a usable form.
skew. addressed this by aggregating data from the world's major cryptocurrency derivatives exchanges — including BitMEX, Deribit, CME, and others — and presenting it through a suite of standardised dashboards that showed open interest, funding rates, implied volatility surfaces, options positioning, and a wide range of other metrics in real time. The platform became a reference tool for institutional traders, quantitative funds, market makers, and anyone needing a systematic view of how cryptocurrency derivatives markets were positioned and how sentiment was shifting. Partners including OKEx integrated directly with the platform, and coverage expanded continuously as new exchanges and instrument types emerged.
The $5 million round followed an earlier $2 million seed led by Firstminute Capital and Seedcamp, which had funded the initial platform build. With the larger round, skew. was positioned to scale both its data engineering infrastructure and its commercial team, capturing the growing institutional interest in digital assets that was accelerating as major investment banks, hedge funds, and asset managers began establishing dedicated cryptocurrency trading desks. The company was later acquired by Coinbase in May 2021, providing an exit that validated the thesis that institutional-grade data infrastructure was a foundational requirement for the maturation of digital asset markets.
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