Standard Chartered and SBI Back Crypto Insurer Soter as Funding Reaches $23.5 Million

SC Ventures, Standard Chartered's venture arm, and Japan's SBI Group have joined the second close of Soter Insure's Series B, the digital asset insurer said on 5 November. Token Bay Capital, an investor since the company's Series A, followed on in the same round. The new money joins a first close announced on 29 July and led by Galaxy Digital, which also led the Series A.

Soter puts total funding to date at $23.5 million in cash plus more than 500 bitcoin and 2,000 ether, which it values at Dh86.3 million. What each investor paid was not disclosed, and no filing states the size of the round in dollars.

The first close had already brought in Coinbase Ventures and Franklin Templeton as new backers, with follow-on from Brevan Howard Digital, Soter said at the time.

What the Proceeds Buy

Capacity first. Soter said it will use the money to write more insurance, deepen underwriting and technology, and expand into Asia-Pacific through its Hong Kong presence, as well as Europe and the US.

The company is headquartered in Abu Dhabi and operates out of Bermuda, with offices in London, New York and Dubai, and was incubated by Further Ventures and WebN Group. Its Bermuda operating entity holds a full Class IIGB licence from the Bermuda Monetary Authority, and that is where the underwriting capacity behind its policies sits.

UAE distribution runs through a partnership with Dubai Insurance P.S.C. for fiat, bitcoin and ether denominated policies.

"Insurance is a critical but often overlooked part of the digital assets ecosystem," said Herve Francois, principal of the Digital Assets Fund at SC Ventures. SC Ventures says it has deployed more than $1 billion across more than 30 portfolio companies since 2018.

Up to $5 Million, 200 BTC or 2,000 ETH

The number that matters for anyone buying this cover is how much Soter can pay before it needs help. Founder and chief executive Henson Orser told CoinDesk the company can insure losses of up to $5 million, 200 BTC or 2,000 ETH using its own assets, and works with other insurers to share the risk on anything larger. A lost hot wallet or a protocol exploit well past those limits therefore sits partly with other underwriters.

The policies cover directors and officers, professional indemnity, crime, specie, slashing and smart contract failure, and are written in either fiat or native tokens.

"Banks can't scale in digital assets without the risk protection they rely on everywhere else, and today that protection is still scarce," Orser said.

Premiums and Claims in the Same Coin

Orser told CoinDesk that any bitcoin or ether Soter has raised along the way has gone to fund insurance programs denominated in that currency, not into the general operating account. Those funds are held in separate accounts in cold storage at regulated custodians, so a claim paid in BTC is backed by BTC rather than by whatever the treasury happens to hold that week.

The raise lands after a bruising few weeks. About $6.3 billion was stolen from Binance on 29 October, and Crédit Mutuel Arkéa has confirmed that attackers used the bank's own treasury account to send money to other banks, from where it was converted into cryptocurrency, after blockchain investigator ZachXBT named it as the victim of a suspected $133 million theft. The bank has not confirmed that figure.

Orser said the incidents had hardenened the crime market slightly: "We've seen a slight hardening in the market for crime through the latest incidents, but the market is still evolving."

The Round Still Has No Dollar Price Tag

Valuing the coin portion at recent prices is what produces the roughly $66 million figure attached to this raise. That is arithmetic, not a disclosed number: it moves with bitcoin and ether, and Soter's own figure remains Dh86.3 million plus the coins.

One question the company has flagged rather than answered is how policies should treat losses caused by autonomous AI agents that execute transactions for users. Soter has acknowledged the industry has yet to settle it, which leaves a growing category of losses outside any standard wording for now.

Soter described the $23.5 million and the coins as what the round will bring once completed, so the second close is not necessarily the last. Watch the final close, and whether the company publishes the new capacity it is buying, because that figure, not the headline total, decides how large a loss it can absorb on its own. Standard Chartered has been expanding its own crypto footprint in the UAE at the same time.