The investment amount was not disclosed. Kemet, founded in November 2021 by Egyptian-born technologist Ash Ashmawy, has now raised approximately $8 million in total funding. The company provides what the traditional finance industry calls an Order and Execution Management System, or OEMS, combined with a Portfolio Management System, or PMS. The OEMS layer is software that sits between a trading desk and multiple exchanges, handling order routing, risk tracking, automated hedging, and complex multi-leg options strategies in one place. The PMS layer adds portfolio management and reconciliation capabilities, giving institutional desks a unified view of positions and exposures across venues. Before platforms like Kemet, institutional crypto desks had to manually coordinate across multiple exchange APIs and dashboards.

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What the Partnership Covers

The Coinbase deal integrates four venues into Kemet's unified interface: Coinbase Exchange, Coinbase Derivatives Exchange, Coinbase International Exchange, and Deribit. Coinbase acquired Deribit, the world's largest crypto options exchange by volume and open interest, for $2.9 billion in what was the largest acquisition in crypto industry history at the time, in a deal that closed in August 2025.

In the month before the deal closed, Deribit was processing roughly $185 billion in monthly volume and holding around $60 billion in open interest.

Coinbase has publicly framed its broader ambition as becoming an "everything exchange," a single institutional platform spanning spot, futures, perpetuals, and options. The Kemet investment is a direct infrastructure layer on top of that vision, addressing how professional desks actually manage positions across what is now a sprawling multi-venue system.

Kemet reported processing more than $30 billion in cumulative trading volume as of this announcement, according to TechCabal, up from $1 billion at the time of its March 2024 seed round.

That seed round, which raised $5 million, was led by Further Ventures, a VC firm backed by Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund ADQ and Mastercard, with co-investors including Csquared Ventures, FalconX, Deribit, QCP, and Hyperithm.

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Ashmawy's Background and the Regulatory Obstacle

Ashmawy previously served as Global Head of Cloud at Tradeweb, the institutional fixed-income marketplace, and was a reliability engineering lead at D.E. Shaw and Co. He was also the first Site Reliability Engineer at Arcesium.

The company's name is a deliberate cultural marker: "Kemet" is the ancient Egyptian word for "black land," the name Egyptians gave their own country in reference to the dark, fertile soil of the Nile floodplain.

Despite building a platform now backed by Coinbase Ventures, Ashmawy is direct about the barriers facing African markets specifically. "There is still a lack of regulatory clarity around derivatives in most African countries," he told TechCabal.

South Africa's VALR only received its derivatives provider license from the Financial Sector Conduct Authority in October 2025, making it the first licensed crypto OTC derivatives provider on the continent. Nigeria's Roqqu exited beta on its futures product just this past March, reporting 30,000 users during the testing period. Egypt's central bank prohibits unlicensed crypto issuance and trading outright.

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The Market Context

Derivatives now account for 82 percent of all centralized exchange volume globally, compared to 18 percent for spot trading, according to CoinGlass data cited by TechCabal.

Total crypto derivatives volume reached approximately $85.7 trillion in 2025. The market for crypto derivative trading platforms is currently valued at roughly $46.8 billion and is projected to reach $117 billion by 2035, growing at an 11 percent compound annual rate, according to Business Research Insights, a commercial market research firm.

Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America together account for around 10 percent of global derivatives activity, according to TechCabal.

On the institutional side, Bitcoin derivatives open interest on the iShares Bitcoin Trust options product briefly surpassed Deribit in April 2026, suggesting growing institutional appetite for regulated US products. CME crypto futures averaged 407,200 daily contracts in the 2025 to 2026 period, up roughly 46 to 47 percent year over year.

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What It Signals

Kemet had already established an exchange partnership with OKX in December 2024, expanding derivatives infrastructure access to OKX's institutional client base before securing the Coinbase deal. That track record of exchange integrations suggests Kemet appears to be positioning itself as venue-agnostic infrastructure rather than a captive Coinbase product.

For African and broader emerging market founders watching this space, the gap Kemet occupies globally has no domestic equivalent yet. As regulatory frameworks across the continent slowly expand to cover digital asset derivatives, the institutional tooling layer will need to follow.

Whether that eventually creates an opening for regionally focused OEMS players, or simply extends Kemet's reach into those markets, depends largely on how quickly local regulators move.