• Bronze

  Participated · Seed · Jan 2024

  Bronze, founded by Lex Dromgoole and Gwilym Gold, builds an audio engine and a "transformational sound format" that enables music to be released as generative, interactive, or personalized experiences. Its audio engine is licensed by platforms to produce experiences suited for gaming, AR, VR and other applications. The company offers AI-assisted music creation tools and is set to launch the beta of its AI music creation tool this year. Bronze operates as Bronzeformat Limited and is based in London, UK. The startup closed a $1.3 million pre-seed round in January 2024 (funding details also report €1.3M).

• Lens Protocol

  Participated · Equity · Jun 2023

  Lens is a decentralized protocol designed to serve as infrastructure for social and consumer apps; users own their identity and content and apps act as clients to the blockchain. It defines social primitives — accounts, usernames, graphs, feeds, and groups — and supports developer-created rules for access control, token gating, and subscriber-only feeds. Lens v3 is a complete protocol overhaul that moves the stack from Polygon to zkSync and validiums to dramatically lower transaction costs and enable consumer-scale usage. The project powers apps on Lens v2 including Zora, Hey, Kaira, and Orb, and the team aims for interactions to cost roughly as much as cloud server costs so developers can absorb them. Avara announced a $31 million funding round for Lens, and the Lens team plans to launch the Lens v3 mainnet in the first quarter of 2025. Avara founder Stani Kulechov frames the effort around decentralization that gives users more power and enables new revenue-sharing models for creators. Lens Protocol is a decentralized social networking protocol developed by Aave aimed at creating an open, neutral layer for social apps. The protocol focuses on giving users more control over their data and enabling developers to build varied use cases from gaming to social media. Lens has been in beta since May 2022 and so far has granted access to a limited set of users while additional desktop and mobile applications are being built (Orb, Riff, Enso Collective). The team says the roadmap will remain in beta until infrastructure and the ecosystem grow sufficiently to open protocol access more broadly. Lens aims to be a flexible, neutral protocol that shares monetization across contributors rather than being owned by a single incumbent. The protocol raised $15M to expand its ecosystem and continue development; there is no valuation available.

• MARA

  Participated · Equity · May 2022

  MARA is a pan‑African crypto exchange building a suite of products including a custodial retail wallet, a pro exchange for professional traders, and its own layer‑one blockchain (the MARA chain). The company plans to launch its retail app in July, followed by the exchange, with the MARA chain scheduled to go live in the fourth quarter. MARA will initially launch in Kenya and Nigeria before expanding to other African countries. The startup announced a $23 million raise composed of equity and a token sale. The firm says it intends to work closely with regulators across African nations, running hackathons and advising governments (including the Central African Republic) on crypto adoption and KYC/AML measures. CEO Chi Nnadi previously built a blockchain‑linked nonprofit; other executive team members named in the article include Lucas Llinás Múnera, Dearg OBartuin, and Kate Kallot.

No current team members are available.