The Venture Codex

Participated · Seed · Mar 2023

Staging Labs was founded by Francois Le Nguyen and Jake Harwood after Le Nguyen lost $10,000 in a phishing attack; the team currently has three full-time staff. Its core product, Saferoot, continuously scans transactions and can intercept in-flight transfers to automatically move assets from a vulnerable wallet to a backup safe. The company emphasizes rapid replacement transactions to move funds before attackers can complete a theft, leveraging Harwood’s distributed-systems experience. Staging Labs plans to expand beyond in-flight protection to cover pre-flight (before a user initiates a transaction) and post-flight (fund recovery, possibly involving law enforcement) and is already in talks with partners to develop those capabilities. For monetization it intends to charge users a subscription fee plus a percentage of assets successfully recovered, and to share revenues with wallet partners; it says it is in talks with dozens of wallets and is nearing a partnership with one. Financially, Staging Labs announced an oversubscribed $1.1 million pre-seed financing and describes the raise as a "party round."