Participated · Seed · Mar 2022

Tea is a unified package manager, universal interpreter and virtual environment manager built to simplify how developers install and manage software packages. The company launched a CLI last month to challenge incumbents such as NPM and Homebrew and has attracted roughly 16,000 developers who have authenticated their packages with Tea. Tea was formally founded last November in Puerto Rico by Max Howell and Timothy Lewis and emerged from stealth in March backed by $8 million in funding, including participation from the venture capital arm of Binance. The team plans to build a web3 protocol that uses digital contracts and issues NFTs to package maintainers to evidence work and direct rewards, with the protocol’s core components remaining optional. Management says the protocol is expected to be available sometime in 2023 and that Tea will offer revenue-generating services on top of the protocol, including enterprise security and license-management tools. Tea builds an open-source web3 platform to automate sponsorship and compensation for open source developers. Its product issues utility tokens tied to projects and uses digital contracts so sponsors can receive perks like special access or license agreements guaranteeing developer support. Tea maintains a decentralized, immutable graph that registers projects and their dependencies; the company will bootstrap that graph from Homebrew. The platform adds a security layer to notify users and owners when parts of a stack break and includes a slashing mechanism to transfer project control if maintainers are unavailable. Tea describes its model as a "loyalty scheme" and uses an inflationary mechanism to allocate rewards proportionally across the ecosystem. The company is Puerto Rico–based and was co-founded by Max Howell and three fellow engineers; it announced an $8 million seed financing led by Binance Labs.

Led · Equity · Mar 2022

NexGen Cloud operates a GPU cloud platform called Hyperstack that manages thousands of GPUs to deliver AI compute capacity and an AI-as-a-Service cloud solution. The company has developed its own API to enable channel partners to offer enterprise-grade AI compute through Hyperstack. Its platform serves customers including Red Hat, Ingenix.AI, Tyne, and ArchiLabs across sectors such as software development, clinical trials, and AEC design. NexGen has positioned itself as an early leader in GPU cloud computing and emphasizes reliable performance and support. The company will use the newly raised funds to scale hyperscale infrastructure globally and to establish sovereign AI capabilities in Europe. It also plans to expand its Full Stack Cloud capabilities to support production-ready AI applications for enterprises. NexGen Cloud is a Marbella, Spain-based Web 3.0-focused infrastructure-as-a-service company led by founder and director Chris Starkey. The company builds decentralized storage operations on the Filecoin network and operates GPU-intensive cloud infrastructure for AI, rendering, machine learning and medical research. Its storage arm is described as the largest Filecoin decentralized project in Europe, comprising two Tier III data-centre sites in Belgium and the Netherlands. Over the year this project will provide over 100 petabytes of data storage aimed at managed service providers, businesses and consumers seeking affordable, secure storage. NexGen Cloud is working with Protocol Labs to improve data onboarding to Filecoin and integration with platforms such as AWS S3, Azure and Rubrik. The company raised $14M through a swap agreement with DARMA Capital and plans to expand into the UK, France, Spain and Portugal in 2022/23.

Participated · Series A · Jan 2022

Web3Auth builds non-custodial key management and authentication infrastructure for web3 applications and wallets, enabling password-less auth and OAuth logins (Google, Twitter, Discord, Reddit) to simplify blockchain onboarding. It is powered by the open-source Torus Network and aims to eliminate seed phrases by leveraging social accounts and devices users already own. The company supports familiar login flows while still allowing advanced users to connect traditional wallets or key management systems. Web3Auth plans to use new funding to accelerate expansion into decentralized gaming, NFTs and social applications and to increase headcount. Financially, it closed a $13M Series A and has raised $15M total since its 2019 inception. Operatively, more than 300 apps and wallets had selected Web3Auth in 2021 to secure over four million users' private keys, and its user base grew 30x year-over-year.

Led · Equity · Sep 2021

Nahmii is a Layer 2 scaling protocol for Ethereum that launched Nahmii 2.0 to support generalized smart contracts and institutional use cases. Nahmii 2.0 uses a “state pool” technology that combines the instant finality of state channels with pooled security to deliver instant, Ethereum-secured finality and high transaction speeds. The platform emphasizes low, predictable fees, composability, optional KYC/AML integration for regulated institutions, and a complete suite of developer tools that are EVM-compatible. The new version builds on a payments-only Nahmii 1.0 (released in 2018), and the team has prior experience on Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, Plasma, and a content-distribution platform that served 50 million daily users. Nahmii says its low latency is on par with centralized servers and that these attributes enable institutional-scale applications. The company has raised $8M in the current funding round.

Led · Seed · May 2021

NiiFi is developing a low-latency decentralized exchange that runs on Nahmii, an Ethereum layer-2 network designed to boost transaction throughput. By leveraging Nahmii’s architecture, the platform provides instant, non-probabilistic settlement finality, a capability positioned to attract institutional traders. The exchange also embeds know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money-laundering (AML) functionality to meet compliance demands often absent in DeFi. According to Nahmii developer Jacobo Toll-Messia, the underlying technology is proprietary and currently patent-pending. NiiFi’s product roadmap centers on turning these technical advantages into a commercially viable DEX. The team, backed by seasoned crypto investors, plans additional fundraising rounds to expand both the exchange and the broader Nahmii layer-2 ecosystem.