Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures invests in VAKT Blockchain solutions in Energy Market

VAKT has annouced $5 Million in investment from Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures (SAEV). The transaction is executed in terms of new shares.

Vakt is a consortium of leading global energy majors, commodity traders and banks with a vision to digitize the global commodities trading industry with blockchain enabled platform. The trading majors include Koch Supply & Trading, Gunvor and Mercuria. The participating energy majors are Reliance Industries, Total, BP, Equinor, Shell while ABN Amro, ING, Societe General banks support Vakt.

Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures is the 12th investor in VAKT. VAKT plans to leverage the latest investment to further development of the platform and expansion into new markets with a focus on Asia.

Executive opinion

VAKT CEO, Etienne Amic, said, "The North Sea is just the start for us. In a few short months, we have learnt a great deal from having the platform in production and iterating our product to make it better suited for global waterborne oil. We are now on a path to becoming the backbone of the post-trade processing of physical commodities. We couldn’t ask for a better partner ahead of our future expansion than Saudi Aramco – especially when it comes to the company’s reach and expertise in Asia."

MD of SAEV Europe, Hans Middelthon, said, "VAKT has demonstrated that their platform has the potential to digitise what is currently a very manual process and be truly transformative to end users and customers. Leveraging blockchain theory and applying it to the complicated world of post-trade processing, VAKT has made a compelling pitch to become an integral part of market infrastructure. SAEV’s mission is to develop and deploy technologies into Aramco’s operations. VAKT is an excellent  candidate in this sense and we look forward to helping the company with its development.'

VAKT Platform Investment

In November 2018, VAKT launched its enterprise-grade blockchain enabled commodity post-trade processing platform to manages physical energy transactions from trade entry to final settlement. The company aims to eliminate reconciliation and paper-based processes. VAKT has been working with ThoughtWorks and supported by JPMorgan’s Quorum private distributed ledger.

VAKT platform is live in the North Sea BFOET crude oil market. As a part of the deal, the Aramco Trading company joins the platform as a new user. The company will bring its own North Sea trading volumes.

In December 2018, Reliance Industries Limited acquired a 5.56% strategic stake in Vakt Holdings Limited, UK.