A  pioneer in digital asset management, Animoca Brands has secured US$2.75M in its latest funding round led by influential fintech venture capital firm Nyca Partners. The company also received backing from renowned investor Mark Cuban and other distinguished Silicon Valley firms.

The hackathon-born company was established by co-founders Anna Mouland and Robert Muresan. Their insights into the limitations of digital asset succession led to the inception of Bequest Finance. The company stands to revolutionise the multi-trillion dollar trusts and estates industry by providing non-custodial distribution solutions to bolster legal processes for digital assets. Bequest Finance’s primary mission is to allow the global trusts and estates industry to seamlessly integrate all digital assets. It could facilitate a market expansion bringing in tens of billions of dollars annually. With Bequest, estate planners can compliantly add any digital asset to their client’s estate: from Bitcoin, to email, to photo and video content.

“Bequest Finance is working on a solution to the increasingly common problem of passing digital assets to the next generation. They have created an easy-to-use tool for trust and estate lawyers to enable their clients to transfer not only crypto, but in the future, any password protected digital asset,” said Managing Partner at NycaHans Morris,. Current best practice – leaving behind a private key for an heir to access – poses significant risk to all parties involved. Many successors lack the required technical know-how to appropriately recover and distribute digital assets. Even if they are able to carry out this process, the more fundamental issue of legal compliance remains.

Depending on the asset holder’s estate plan, it is often not compliant for some pre-approved recipient to gain custody of digital assets and become responsible for their distribution. In most instances, it is not even legal for lawyers to custody their client’s private key or passwords. Probate proceedings are notoriously cumbersome, and dealing with centralized entities to gain access to important client data causes unnecessary complications. Both founders entered the venture with a wealth of industry experience. Anna Mouland was previously an engineer at Aquanow, one of Canada’s most accomplished B2B digital asset infrastructure companies, as well as VRRB Labs, an innovative layer 1 blockchain. Robert Muresan also has a robust background in engineering, having worked at top tech companies Bitgo and Shopify as a Software Engineer. Both founders also attended prestigious universities for Computer Science, with Anna graduating from McGill University in and Robert dropping out of the University of Waterloo to pursue Bequest.

Following their initial success at the hackathon, Anna and Robert worked with Fenwick & West to ensure their product’s compliance and assembled an advisory board for product refinement. During this process, the team identified that the challenge of asset transfer extends beyond cryptocurrencies, with all password-protected digital assets facing similar problems.Bequest Finance is looking forward to continuing its growth and development.