Two family offices back crypto trading platform

New York City-based family offices GF Investments and the private investment office of Harvey Golub, the former CEO and chairman of American Express, are backing a crypto trading platform, at a time when private capital is renewing its interest in crypto assets. 

The family offices, together with two institutional investors, have signed a cheque for $25 million for TradAir, a Tel Aviv-based crypto and foreign exchange trading platform. Set up 2010, TradAir has received a number of previous funding rounds, with the latest being this Series D one. But it’s the first time the two family offices have backed TradAir. 

GF Investments is the family office of the Glick family, who are prominent in the New York diamond trade, with their family business, Louis Glick & Company. The family office is now run by Simon Glick, the son of Louis who set up the family business in 1945. The Glick family are also big real estate developers and at one point were substantial investors in Canary Wharf in London, the city’s largest commercial real estate project back in the 1980s. 

Golub has been a prominent figure in the American corporate world for 50 years and sits on numerous boards, many of them of financial companies. The name of Golub’s family office isn’t known. 

This isn’t the first time GF Investments and Golub have cooperated in the investment world. The two backed Pagaya Investments, an Israel-based asset management fintech platform, last year, and  HudsonField, a US-based consultancy in the oil and gas, logistics and financial sectors, in 2016.  

There has been a rival of interest in crypto assets and trading platforms from private investment groups since the beginning of the year as Bitcoin has recovered significantly from its torrid time in 2018. Here are some recent thoughts on the sector and interest from family offices.