Bloomberg says that the former head of FTX US has raised $5 million from several investors to start a new cryptocurrency software company.
Brett Harrison was president of FTX US from May 2021 to September 2022. Coinbase Ventures and Circle Ventures have given him money to start a new software company. Shari Glazer of Kalos Labs and Anthony Scaramucci were also part of the seed round, along with SALT Fund, Motivate VC, P2P Validator, Third Kind Venture Capital, and P2P Validator.
His new company, called Architect, will make trading software for big companies that want to get into the crypto markets. He told Bloomberg that he hopes Architect will “help people feel good about trading in this industry again.”
Harrison left FTX US months before the company went bankrupt under the bad leadership of Sam Bankman-Fried, who was in charge of the global FTX cryptocurrency exchange and a few other companies that were under its control. In November, FTX US was one of about 130 FTX Group companies that filed for bankruptcy.
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Harrison talked about why he left the crypto exchange in a long thread on Twitter on January 14. He said that his relationship with Bankman-Fried “began to break down” six months into his job and that the former FTX CEO showed “total insecurity and stubbornness” whenever there was a problem.
Bankman-Fried is facing up to 115 years in prison and eight criminal charges for, among other things, cheating investors and breaking laws about how to pay for campaigns. On January 5, he said he wasn’t guilty of everything.
As the bear market got worse in the second half of 2022, venture capital started to dry up. As crypto markets get used to the new reality, the collapse of FTX and its effects on other exchanges seem to have made it harder to raise money. Bloomberg says that Harrison wanted to get as much as $10 million for Architect when the company was worth $100 million.
