UK-headquartered Havona Technology has launched an initial pre-seed funding round, led by GTR Ventures (GTRV). GTRV has contributed 20% of the funding in exchange for equity.
The funds will enable Havona, a trade technology company, to expand into Singapore, where it plans to open an Asia office by the second half of next year.
Havona operates a post-trade platform that provides UNCITRAL Model Law of Electronic Transferable Records (MLETR)-compliant digital trade solutions to commodity traders, allowing real-time digital document transfer.
The platform also allows for “seamless” collaboration between principals, counterparties and financial institutions, cryptographic encryption of digital documents and “automated collaborative end-to-end digital trade workflows”, according to Havona.
Havona tells GTR it has 20 companies on its waitlist, including a medium-sized Swiss metals trader with volumes and/or credit lines of US$200mn annually and an agri commodities trader with around $50bn in annual sales. Havona expects to onboard at least five clients by the second quarter of 2025.
“We are excited to have GTR Ventures join us in our global seed funding round,” says Greg Pradervand, co-founder and chief commercial officer of Havona. “The use of proceeds will allow us to expand our geographical presence as well as fine-tune our proprietary post-trade platform, enabling our customers to exchange value with accurate data points while managing risk and compliance from trade entry to completion.”
The UK and Singapore are world leaders in MLETR-compliant digital document legislation, which has also been adopted by other countries, including Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and France.
