Photo Blythe Masters, former star banker at JPMorgan Chase, has been struggling to raise money for her start-up, Digital Asset Holdings. Credit Joe Amon/The Denver Post The newest venture from Blythe Masters, until recently a star banker at JPMorgan Chase , appeared to be an overnight success story in the making.
Her start-up, Digital Asset Holdings , is working in one of the hottest areas of growth on Wall Street today: the blockchain technology that underlies the virtual currency Bitcoin. And Ms. Masters has already received a promise from JPMorgan , her former employer, to be the lead investor on the new project, pitching in around $7.5 million.
But Ms. Masters’s company has been struggling for months to close the deal with other investors. Most recently, large banks including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup have balked at putting money into Digital Asset Holdings after learning that JPMorgan was being given better terms than other investors, according to several people briefed on the deal.
The banks and financial firms looking into investing, the people said, have also expressed doubts about the actual software solutions Ms. Masters’s start-up is working on, much of which has been put together through purchases of smaller start-ups.
“The deal would need to improve materially for us to get involved,” said one executive at a financial firm, who has been looking at putting money into Ms. Masters’s company, speaking on the condition of anonymity because negotiations were continuing. “It’s not supercompelling.”
Digital Asset Holdings’ chief marketing officer, Beth Shah, said assertions that the company was facing challenges in raising funds were inaccurate but she declined to provide further details. All of the potential investors declined to comment.
The challenges that Ms. Masters is facing reflect in part the increasingly difficult environment facing start-ups of all sorts as investors have begun to worry that […]
