Participated · Seed · Oct 2024

Liquidium is a Bitcoin-native DeFi platform that offers peer-to-peer bitcoin lending and borrowing. Its protocol lets users borrow bitcoin using Bitcoin-based assets such as Ordinals and Runes as collateral, secured via Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBTs) and discrete logarithm contracts (DLCs) on Bitcoin layer one. The company launched a rune lending service weeks before this financing and says it continuously expands supported assets. Liquidium is compatible with wallets including Xverse, Unisat, and Leather and plans to add BRC-20 assets and integrate wallets like OKX and Phantom. Founded in 2022, Liquidium aims to be an Aave-like lending hub on native Bitcoin with mature liquidity pools for passive income and overcollateralized borrowing. Financially, Liquidium announced a $2.75M seed financing from a group of institutional and individual investors. The team intends to broaden access across the Bitcoin ecosystem and expand its reach into Eastern markets. Liquidium operates a P2P lending protocol on the Bitcoin blockchain that lets users use native Ordinals inscriptions as collateral to borrow and lend native bitcoin. The platform is designed to eliminate intermediaries and custodians by keeping collateral and lending interactions on-chain. Liquidium announced completion of a $1.25M Pre-Seed financing. Named participants in the round include Bitcoin Frontier Fund, Side Door Ventures, Actai Ventures, Sora Ventures, Spicy Capital, UTXO Management, and several angel investors. The article does not provide operating metrics, a founding year, or a company location.

Participated · Seed · May 2024

Parasail builds DePIN infrastructure that authorizes and coordinates physical assets and hardware on decentralized networks to ensure user service levels. The platform focuses on dynamically allocating hardware resources according to demand. The company says the new funding will accelerate its overall roadmap and deployment of interested assets and hardware on DePIN. Financially, Parasail completed a $4.0M seed financing at a $50.0M valuation led by Protocol Labs. The raise provides early-stage capital to scale operations and implement its coordination mechanisms. No operating metrics or founding details were provided in the article.

Participated · Series B · Feb 2022

Tribal provides SMBs in emerging markets with corporate spend management, physical and virtual cards, international and local wires, and financing for payments. The company launched a beta spend management platform in December 2019 and introduced Tribal Pay in 2020, enabling transfers to 180+ countries and payment financing for up to 120 days. Tribal serves a fast-growing client base across more than 22 countries and grew its LatAm volume by 90x in 2021. Proceeds from the latest round will be used to expand professional teams across Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Chile as the company scales in LatAm. The founding and management team includes former leaders from HSBC, Visa, Experian, Mercado Libre, American Express, Nubank, Marqeta, and Didi Pay. To date the company has raised a total of $140 million including the newly announced $60M Series B. Tribal Credit issues virtual and physical multi-currency business Visa cards (Tribal Card) and a payments product (Tribal Pay) aimed at startups and SMBs in emerging markets. The company uses a proprietary AI-driven underwriting process to evaluate businesses and approve credit lines without impacting founders’ personal credit. Tribal’s platform also offers spend management tools for distributed teams and wire/treasury capabilities. Its largest market is Mexico, and it lists customers including Minu, Ben and Frank, Fairplay and SLM. Tribal reports 10x year-over-year growth and has grown headcount to 75 employees from 31 the prior year. The company joined Visa’s Fintech Fast Track Program and received $3 million from the Stellar Development Foundation as part of the recent raise. Tribal says it is exploring four additional Latin American markets and expects to be operational in one new market by year-end. Tribal Credit provides a business credit-card product aimed at SMEs and startups in emerging markets, combining virtual corporate cards, configurable spending limits, and instant card suspension. Its platform uses AI-driven analytics and a proprietary AI algorithm developed from NYU research to surface spend insights and control costs. The company issues an unlimited number of virtual cards to employees and emphasizes transparency and control over corporate expenditures. Tribal Credit is in private beta and has a distributed team mainly based in San Francisco with remote teams in Cairo, Dubai, and New York. The founding team includes serial entrepreneurs, data scientists, and fintech executives with backgrounds in banking, risk, compliance, and scaling in emerging markets. With new capital, the company plans to scale operations, pursue partnerships, and expand development, sales, and operations teams.

Participated · Initial Coin Offering · Nov 2021

Founded around 2018, Agoric began as a JavaScript-based smart-contract coding language and has since evolved into a proof-of-stake blockchain linked to the Cosmos ecosystem. Its core product is a platform that enables developers to write smart contracts in JavaScript with additional security controls. Agoric is focused on bringing millions of JavaScript developers into crypto and DeFi by meeting them in a familiar language. The project has built a consensus layer with the Cosmos SDK and is preparing an economic applications layer that will include a stable token called Run. The company completed a public token sale that added roughly 40,000 new account holders and has so far raised over $85 million including a private sale and earlier seed funding. Future phases include a permission phase for community-vetted core contracts, continued security testing, bug bounties, and eventual permissionless deployment. Agoric is a JavaScript-native smart contract platform and Proof-of-Stake blockchain built with the Cosmos SDK that provides a composable development environment with reusable governance, lending, and trading components. The chain includes built-in DeFi primitives such as RUN (a stable local currency) and BLD (a staking token) to support on-chain economic activity. Agoric launched its public mainnet after testing network infrastructure and staking dynamics with more than 100 validators. The team intends to use funding to scale the ecosystem and expand developer programs, including additional entry points into DeFi and continued developer bounties. Agoric has partnered with Keplr to support BLD staking and governance and aims to attract JavaScript developers and enterprises to build interoperable DeFi applications. The project is led by CEO Dean Tribble and Chief Scientist Mark S. Miller. Agoric is developing a blockchain-agnostic programming language for smart contracts that is based on JavaScript and designed to enable formal verification while remaining accessible to developers. The company aims to reduce costly smart-contract bugs by making contracts more secure and easier to audit. Agoric launched last year and is preparing to bring its technology to market, with a near-term goal of launching a testnet. The startup plans to double its team with the new funding, prioritizing engineering and business development hires. It also intends to build interoperability with top-tier next-generation decentralized projects. Chief scientist Mark Miller emphasized that even experienced developers can accidentally introduce expensive errors into smart contracts, motivating Agoric’s approach. The company received a $4 million financing to support these product and go-to-market efforts.