Triterras, a blockchain-based Fintech solution provider for trade finance, has revealed that its Kratos marketplace has handled approximately $5 billion of trade finance volume during the past six months ending on August 31, 2020.
Kratos is a large commodity trading and trade finance platform that aims to connect commodity traders to trade partners. It sources capital from lenders directly through an online platform. Triterras monetizes activity on the Kratos platform by charging fees on trade finance transactions.
Srinivas Koneru, the founder and chairman at Triterras, claims that the company is on track to meet or even exceed its initial fiscal year 2020 targets that were released in July of this year.
Koneru noted:
“We enter the second half of the fiscal year with solid operating momentum, giving us confidence in our fiscal year 2021 projections.”
Koneru added that he’s encouraged by the trajectory of the company’s trade and trade finance volumes and fees, as traders and lenders are realizing that they can benefit from conducting transactions on the Kratos platform. The SME trade and trade finance market has become quite large and Kratos has been developed to address the $1.5 trillion annual trade finance shortfall, Koneru claims.
Earlier this year, Triterras had entered an agreement to become a publicly listed company via a business combination with Netfin Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: NFIN, NFINW).
As confirmed in a release:
“The business combination has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both Netfin and Triterras Fintech and is estimated to close in late October 2020 with the combined company’s ordinary shares and warrants to be listed on Nasdaq under the symbols TRIT and TRITW, subject to regulatory and shareholder approvals and other customary closing conditions.”
Established in 2018, Triterras is a Fintech firm focused on both trade and trade finance. The company has developed and operates Kratos, a major commodity trading and trade finance platform.
In an interview with Crowdfund Insider (in March 2020), Tom Trowbridge, former president at Hedera Hashgraph and current president at Triterras, had claimed that Triterras has been profitable from the time that it was launched, and during FY2019, it generated more than $90 million in EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization).
In response to a question about why he decided to join Triterras after leaving Hedera Hashgraph, Trowbridge had said:
“At Hedera, we were building a next-generation, institutional quality distributed ledger. Particularly in the blockchain space, when you are in the business of building next-generation technology, the recurring question people ask is: it’s a great technology, but what do you use it for?”
He added:
“That focus on use cases led me to discover trade finance. I realized it’s an enormous sector – $40 trillion – and without any platform of scale. The industry is largely still stuck in the age of paper. Trade finance is the largest, most inefficiently run, legacy industry out there – and that makes it the most exciting place to see how blockchain can help.”
He had also mentioned:
“When I came across Triterras, it was exciting. Here was a company addressing precisely the needs of this complicated industry, leveraging blockchain. And even more compelling, it was the only company doing it at scale. One thing I brought to Triterras from my time at Hedera was a focus on security. At Hedera, we were building a base layer, so we always knew we had to be very resilient to attacks. We had to test our network and technology very early, because we wanted to be safe and thought we’d be a target. At Triterras, I share that same focus on testing the technology to ensure that in these real-world use cases, we are sufficiently robust, prepared, and resistant to a whole spectrum of attack classes.”