• Joepegs

  Led · Seed · Nov 2022

  Joepegs is an NFT marketplace built on the Avalanche blockchain. The marketplace launched in May and has grown to the largest NFT marketplace on Avalanche with over $3.4 million in secondary NFT sales and 12,000 users. It operates an in-house production unit, Joe Studios, and runs an NFT Launchpad that has onboarded over 50 projects to the Avalanche ecosystem. The co-founders, who go by the pseudonyms Cryptofish and 0xMurloc, also founded and remain involved in Trader Joe, a decentralized exchange on Avalanche. The team says the recent funding will be used to invest in platform capabilities and to produce in-house content and new collections in the near term. Longer term, Joepegs plans to branch into different NFT categories including fashion, physical merchandise and gaming.

• Martian

  Participated · Seed · Oct 2022

  Martian is a wallet built on the Aptos and Move ecosystem that allows users to buy, store, swap tokens, collect NFTs and interact with dApps. The product supports web3-native notifications to improve wallet user experience and has close to 1 million installs to date. The company has partnerships with multiple decentralized applications including Tortuga, Aptos Name Service, Topaz and Souffl3, and works with Wormhole and LayerZero on cross-chain efforts. Martian has secured a grant from Aptos. The recent financing will be used to accelerate hiring and to develop new wallet features aimed at onboarding crypto users. Financial details disclosed in the article include the $3M Pre-Seed raise.

• Delysium

  Participated · Equity · Oct 2022

  Delysium is an AI-powered open-world platform that builds diverse, free-to-own universes and AI-driven MetaBeings for player-created experiences. The company has released a Playable Whitepaper game that garnered over 450,000 views in two weeks, showing early traction. Its technology stack includes AI-to-earn, AI conversation models, AI intent recognition, and AI motion generation powered by Deterrence and rct AI to create cognitively aware virtual beings. Delysium has delivered a visually focused Battle Royale title and is focused on scaling content production across its Multiverse. The team plans to use funding to develop content, enable unique AI-powered experiences, and build the Delysium Multiverse—an open-source, decentralized publishing structure for web3 games. The company emphasizes involving Multiverse Operators to set on-chain incentives and co-produce abundant game content. Delysium is described as the world's first playable AAA MMO web3 game, combining open-world MMORPG design with cyberpunk aesthetics and user-generated content. Its gameplay includes battle, exploration, construction, cultivation, social systems and AI-driven "MetaBeing" characters. Players can earn loot boxes (tokens, NFTs, game resources) through various modes and can equip, combine, upgrade, craft and trade in-game assets such as MetaBeings, cyberbodies, weapons, vehicles and environmental objects. The platform also enables creation of narrative assets, including dialogue models, behavioral models, decision-making models, storylines and missions. The team plans to launch Alpha and Beta versions with a PvP tournament in the middle of the year and will use recent funding to support game production and the ecosystem. Delysium is led by rct AI, an entity incubated by Y Combinator, with Yuheng Chan as CEO.

• Paragraph

  Participated · Seed · Oct 2022

  Paragraph operates a web3 publishing platform that offers tools for writers and publishers to build direct relationships with their audiences. The company acquired Mirror, an Ethereum-based blogging platform, and said Mirror founder Denis Nazarov will move into an advisor role while Paragraph founder Colin Armstrong will serve as CEO. Paragraph raised $5 million in fresh financing from Union Square Ventures and Coinbase Ventures. The company stated there will be no immediate changes to either platform and that existing writing and publishing tools and content will remain available. Paragraph previously raised $1.7 million in an October 2022 pre-seed round led by Lemniscap, with participation from FTX Ventures, Binance Labs, GCR and Seed Club Ventures. The company says it intends to accelerate its mission of changing how creators build and grow direct relationships with their audiences. Paragraph is a Web3-native publishing and newsletter platform that helps Web3 writers, DAOs, and NFT communities monetize content and 'charge their earning power' through an all-in-one publishing and newsletter product. The company is based in Santa Clara, CA and was founded by Colin Armstrong. Paragraph has strategic partnerships with Coinvise, Clubs.link, Unstoppable Domains and Farcaster to extend the reach of its proprietary Web3-native publishing solution. The company raised $1.7M in Pre-Seed funding to accelerate product development, user acquisition, and recruitment. Paragraph plans to use the proceeds to scale its engineering and growth teams and expedite its product roadmap.

• Celestia

  Participated · Series A · Oct 2022

  Celestia Foundation operates a modular data-availability network that lets developers deploy applications using any VM and enables secure, self-sovereign blockchains. Led by Chairman Mustafa Al-Bassam, Celestia Mainnet Beta went live in October 2023 and an early ecosystem has formed. Since launch developers have deployed the first 20 rollup chains, and Celestia data blobs recently accounted for more than half of the total data published by rollups. The foundation's core developer community announced a technical roadmap with a primary objective to scale to 1 gigabyte blocks to greatly increase data throughput for rollups. The foundation intends to use newly raised funds to expand operations and accelerate development efforts. Celestia Labs develops a modular blockchain design that focuses on ordering transactions and providing data availability while outsourcing smart-contract execution to other chains or execution environments. The network intentionally strips down its own layer-1 to avoid providing smart contracts or performing computations directly. By separating execution and data layers, Celestia aims to let developers launch their own blockchains with less technical know-how and lower expense, akin to how cloud services provision virtual servers. The approach is presented as an alternative to monolithic Layer-1 blockchains such as Ethereum and Solana. Developers using Celestia gain benefits including higher scalability, shared security for interoperability, and sovereignty of choice between virtual machines and execution environments. Three modular projects—Eclipse, Constellation and dYmension—have chosen Celestia as their data availability layer, and the company recently raised capital to support further development.

No current team members are available.