Baton Systems, a provider of DLT-based bank-to-bank payments middleware for connecting disparate ledgers - both on and off a blockchain - has topped up its recent $12 million funding round with an extra $4 million from VC Illuminate Financial.
Illuminate joins Trinity Ventures, Alsop Louie and Commerce Ventures, which all participated in a Series A round last year.
Founded in 2016 as Ubixi, Baton is working to simplify the "remarkably archaic" payments process in global banking, increasing return on capital, reducing processing times and driving down costs.
In November, the firm revealed that it has been enlisted by JP Morgan to develop a DLT-based platform that helps automate derivatives margin payments.
In a blog on its investment, Illuminate's Luca Zorzino stresses that Baton's value proposition is not blockchain, and is "barely" a distributed ledger.
"The way we think of the proposition is that it’s an orchestration layer between existing ledgers that forces a synchronous workflow," he writes.
Blockchain initiatives may offer great potential but require participants to agree on protocols or standards.
"The team at Baton understood that the path of least resistance was to keep the assets in existing ledgers, connect to them and build a distributed overlay that would offer a number of the advantages that come with blockchain technology," says Zorzino.