Participated · Seed · Nov 2022

Fordefi builds a self-custodial MPC wallet platform. The company is extending its MPC wallet product to retail-facing platforms such as trading platforms and fintech platforms. Fordefi recently completed a $10M financing led by Electric Capital, with Paxos and Alchemy participating. In November 2022 the company raised an $18M seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Participants in that seed included Electric Capital, Alameda Research, Jump Crypto, Castle Island, Pantera Capital, Illuminate Financial, PayPal Alumni Fund, Nima Capital, Digital Currency Group, Defiance Capital, and StarkWare. Fordefi provides an institutional MPC wallet platform and Web3 gateway that enables institutions to connect to dApps across a wide range of chains while keeping digital assets secure. Its platform offers MPC key management, self-serve DeFi policy controls, time-of-transaction smart contract insights, transaction simulation and risk alerts. The company targets institutional DeFi users and emphasizes security and policy controls for enterprise workflows. Fordefi intends to use the Seed proceeds to cement its strategic position, accelerate growth and expand its business reach. Leadership includes Josh Schwartz (CEO), Dima Kogan (CTO) and Michael Volfman (VP of Research and Development). The company is based in New York and Tel Aviv, Israel.

Participated · Series B · Sep 2022

3Commas provides both manual and automated trading strategies, advanced trading bots, and portfolio management solutions for retail, power users, developers and enterprise professionals. The platform surfaces historical performance of different strategies and enables users to easily replicate them via automated trading features and developer APIs. Management says the bots and ecosystem help users earn profits across market conditions, with over 70% of users generating monthly profits from closed deals. 3Commas has launched DeCommas, a subsidiary to simplify access to DeFi trade automation, and has hired a research and development team to support that effort. Planned product work includes advancing its machine learning and AI trading bots, expanding the trading ecosystem, and enhancing developer access to APIs. The company was founded in 2017 and runs on a low-latency cloud infrastructure. 3Commas is a non-custodial order management and crypto-asset management platform that connects to over 23 major crypto exchanges and offers automated trade execution and portfolio management. The platform supports Smart Trade options, DCA and Grid Bots, derivatives-specific bots, and a marketplace for trading signals with TradingView integration. Since launching in 2017, 3Commas reports roughly 100,000 active traders and about $12 billion in annual aggregate trading volume. The product emphasizes risk management solutions, evolving strategies and low-latency cloud infrastructure to serve both novice and advanced traders. 3Commas plans to expand its product lineup with DeFi integrations, newer asset classes, and localized services in Asia and South America, and is testing FX and equity markets. The company aims to accelerate international expansion and further product innovation using the proceeds of its recent financing.

Participated · Equity · Jul 2022

Empiric Network is a decentralized oracle built on StarkNet that connects smart contracts to underlying sources such as cryptocurrency exchanges and large market makers. The project was co-founded by Karl Oskar Schulz and Jonas Nelle and developed in a strategic partnership with StarkWare. Empiric signed partnerships with major data providers and market makers to publish proprietary data on-chain instead of relying on opaque off-chain aggregation. By leveraging StarkNet's lower fees and higher throughput, the network aims to enable on-chain computations and move DeFi beyond simple price feeds toward computational metrics like risk, volatility and yield. The team positions the product as a response to concerns about centralized oracle opacity and past oracle errors. The company launched with a $7 million funding round that it says will largely be used for hiring.

Participated · Seed · Jul 2022

ZKX is a decentralized exchange that makes perpetual futures trading social via PVP battles, copy trade pools and gamified competitions. The protocol leverages an appchain to deliver high scalability and high-speed APIs, combining centralized exchange efficiency with DeFi self-custody. ZKX launched its native $ZKX token on KuCoin, Gate.io and Bitget and introduced staking and an airdrop to reward users and early adopters. The token has a total supply of 100 million with 33% unlocked at launch; staking lets users earn a share of platform revenue and supports governance. The team plans to expand cross-chain interoperability and broaden presence across multiple L1 and L2 ecosystems in 2024. ZKX has raised $7.6M to date from a mix of strategic and earlier investors to accelerate protocol growth and feature rollout. ZKX builds an open-source, permissionless derivatives trading protocol on StarkNet (StarkWare’s L2) that leverages ZK rollups. The protocol aims to address DeFi challenges such as over-reliance on oracles, difficulty bootstrapping liquidity for new derivatives, and centralized listing mechanisms. ZKX plans to launch its mainnet in Q4, followed by its first product: an exchange enabling crypto derivatives trading on StarkNet with built-in rewards, liquidity provisioning, and support for complex trading strategies. The company raised $4.5M in seed funding to support further development of its core offerings, DAO funding, and continued growth of the ZKX ecosystem. ZKX was founded in 2021 and is headquartered in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Founders named in the articles are Eduard Jubany Tur, Naman Sehgal, and Vitaly Yakovlev.

Participated · Equity · Jun 2022

Orderly Network is a remote developer of a permissionless liquidity layer for Web3 trading led by Ran Yi. Built on omnichain infrastructure, it enables deep liquidity for any asset across multiple blockchains and avoids the risks of wrapped asset movement through cross-chain bridging. The platform empowers developers to create a comprehensive array of financial products for traders of any level. It currently supports six chains: Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Ethereum mainnet, and Mantle. Orderly recently raised over $5M and says it will use the funds to bolster its capabilities and continue its innovation and growth trajectory. During its seed round the company secured $20M from institutional investors including Pantera, Sequoia China, Laser Digital, Dragonfly, and Jump. Orderly Network is a permissionless, decentralized exchange protocol and modular ecosystem built on NEAR, using an on-chain order book. Its platform includes a risk engine, matching engine, and shared asset pools designed for composability so dApps can build on top. The protocol supports financial instruments such as spot trading, margin trading, perpetual swaps, lending, and borrowing. Founded in April 2022 and incubated by NEAR and WOO Network, Orderly focuses on enabling modular dApps to utilize its on-chain order-book architecture. The company plans to use recent funding to recruit across key functions, develop and enhance products, grow the Orderly ecosystem, and establish partnerships. To enhance liquidity, Orderly will launch community lending pools allowing token holders to lend assets to market makers with single-sided liquidity provision and sustainable yields.