Participated · Equity · Aug 2025

Build on Bitcoin (BOB) is creating a technology stack that makes Bitcoin-based DeFi possible, positioning itself as the “Gateway to Bitcoin DeFi.” Its core product is the first hybrid zero-knowledge (ZK) rollup designed for Bitcoin, which the team has already brought to testnet. BOB has also launched a BitVM bridge in collaboration with institutional partners and introduced the first Bitcoin intents system that offers one-click BTC access across major chains. The project plans an imminent token generation event (TGE) and a full transition to community governance, reflecting its goal of decentralized ownership. To date, BOB has secured more than $25 million in funding, comprising $21 million from seed and strategic rounds plus a recently completed community sale. This capital is being used to refine its rollup technology, expand cross-chain connectivity, and onboard users and developers into Bitcoin-based DeFi.

Participated · Equity · May 2025

Perpl is a decentralized perpetual futures exchange built natively on Monad, a high-performance EVM blockchain. The platform offers a performant central limit order book with low gas and effective market making to minimize slippage, a fast and deterministic user experience, full custody of assets for traders, and censorship resistance via 100s of geographically distributed independent validators. The company completed a $9.25m funding round and plans to use the proceeds to scale its core team, build the on-chain trading engine, develop its interface, and rigorously test infrastructure. The article does not disclose operating metrics such as revenue or user counts. Perpl emphasizes delivering a best-in-class trading experience from day one through engineering and infrastructure work on Monad.

Participated · Series B · Apr 2025

Xayn develops Noxtua, described as Europe’s first sovereign legal AI platform tailored to German and European legal systems and professional secrecy requirements. The product combines reinforcement learning with transformer and recurrent networks to optimise performance and energy efficiency, claiming up to 98% lower energy use versus alternatives. Noxtua is trained on legal data (not client data) and is evolving into its third generation using C.H.Beck’s exclusive corpus of over 55 million legal documents to provide precise references and improved interpretability. The platform serves law firms, in-house legal teams, enterprises and public sector organisations, and includes prebuilt contract-review workflows and integrations such as Power Automate. Xayn updates its model roughly every three months and is rolling out features like matrix review and multi-step templates to automate legal workflows. Strategic partnerships and customers mentioned include CMS, Dentons, ENBW, Deutsche Telekom and Northern Data. The company has attracted rapid public-sector interest due to its focus on compliance, data sovereignty and on-premise/sovereign hosting options. Xayn provides a privacy-safe, personalized mobile web search experience by running AI on users’ smartphones rather than in the cloud, so no personal data is uploaded to its servers. The product combines a search engine, a discovery feed and a mobile browser with an ad-free experience that learns from Tinder-like swipes without sharing personal data. Xayn’s approach is positioned to appeal to businesses and OEMs because it can be embedded into devices. The company plans to focus expansion on the Asian market, starting with Japan, and to pursue OEM integrations. Since launch the app has been downloaded around 215,000 times and a web version is expected soon. Xayn has also announced additions to its leadership team, including a CFO, CTO and chief growth officer. XAIN develops privacy-oriented Federated Machine Learning (FedML) with a distributed approach that the company says improves privacy, security, and training efficiency. The startup emphasizes industrial usage patterns for privacy-preserving AI and has pursued technology transfer in that area. XAIN partnered with Porsche to become one of the first companies to put blockchain technology into a car. The company was launched as an Oxford University spin-off by CEO Leif-Nissen Lundbaek and CTO Professor Michael Huth. XAIN received a €6 million seed investment in 2018 led by Earlybird to explore FedML and related technology transfer. The newly announced capital — provided in cryptocurrency by IOTA co-founder Dominik Schiener — will be used to propel XAIN’s FedML offering and further product development. Xain builds a blockchain- and AI-powered cybersecurity protocol that lets machines, devices, and people control access to data and resources across IoT environments. The protocol is designed to put resource owners in full control of their data and to allow delegation of access to others. It can integrate with enterprise data and identity systems and is positioned to help customers comply with privacy rules such as GDPR. The company plans to use the seed funding to continue platform development, scale operations, and fully develop and launch its product. Xain intends to hire about 10 additional employees, mostly software engineers, to support those efforts. Leadership includes co‑founders and executives Leif‑Nissen Lundbaek (CEO) and Felix Hahmann (COO).

Participated · Seed · Apr 2025

Optimum is building a decentralized memory layer for blockchains to make data storage, access and propagation faster, cheaper and more decentralized. Its core innovation is a decentralized coding method called Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC), developed by MIT professor Muriel Médard. The company invited creators from institutions like Harvard and MIT to transition from academia into the commercial crypto arena. Optimum's memory infrastructure targets inefficiencies such as redundant gossip networks, congested mempools and bloated nodes that make retrieval costly and slow. The offering is live on a private testnet and Optimum is inviting L1s, L2s, validators and node operators to try its memory layer. Optimum raised an $11 million seed round to advance its technology.

Participated · Equity · Apr 2024

Gasp, previously called Mangata, is developing a cross-chain exchange focused on lightning-fast, low-cost swaps. The team says it aims to become the crypto ecosystem’s primary cross-chain exchange and improve Ethereum’s UX. The company raised a $5 million round in the latest financing, bringing total invested capital to $11 million. The raise values Gasp’s token at $80 million. New partners joining the round include Cluster Capital, Master Ventures, Faculty Group, LVT, Moonhill, and Token Metrics, among others. Returning investors named in the post include Polychain and CMS. Gasp plans to use the new capital to further develop the product and is hiring in marketing, sales, and operations.