Participated · Series A · Jan 2023

Obol Labs is a New York-based developer of infrastructure technologies for Ethereum and other Proof-of-Stake blockchains, led by CEO Collin Myers. The company is focused on Distributed Validator Technology (DVT) to scale consensus and ensure decentralization. Obol is working with liquid staking protocols such as Lido and Stakewise and with larger validators to implement DVT into their operator sets. Its earliest seed supporters include Coinbase Ventures, Figment, Blockdaemon, Chorus One and a collection of validators who are testing and adopting its DVT technology. Obol reports an active community of more than 9,000 members across 20+ countries, with at-home validators running hundreds of multi-continent distributed validators on the Ethereum Goerli testnet using the DV Launchpad. The company intends to use the Series A proceeds to accelerate its Network roadmap to bring DVT to Ethereum mainnet and to expand DVT to other Layer-1 PoS chains like Cosmos and across the L2 ecosystem to improve sequencer resiliency.

Participated · Seed · Sep 2022

Skip is developing infrastructure to enable transaction prioritization, reordering, and bundling (MEV) for Cosmos and other fast-emerging proof-of-stake chains. Its platform uses sealed-bid auctions to let users and traders pay for prioritization and privacy while aiming to democratize access to MEV opportunities. Skip’s infrastructure is designed to share MEV profits with validators, stakers, and protocols and to make it easier for traders to execute strategies. The product also seeks to protect users from gas wars, transaction spam, frontrunning, sandwich attacks, and other toxic MEV behaviors. Skip was founded in 2022 by Barry Plunkett and Maghnus Mareneck, who position the company as the first MEV provider focused on giving blockchain communities control over how MEV revenues are captured and distributed. The team plans to leverage the seed financing to expand its tooling and partnerships across the Cosmos ecosystem and other PoS networks.

Participated · Seed · Sep 2022

Spice AI offers a developer-first platform (Spice.xyz) that provides SQL access over high-performance Apache Arrow APIs to extract time-series data from blockchains. The platform is in Preview with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and ENS datasets and is working to add Solana and Polygon. It targets the complexity of running blockchain nodes, ETL, data lakes, and ML pipelines so developers can build intelligent distributed Web3 apps without managing that infrastructure. The company emphasizes real-time insights from time-series data for use cases from retail buying-pattern analysis to fraud detection and securities trading. Spice AI plans to grow its team and is building an office in greater Seattle while maintaining a footprint in Asia and Australia. Financially, the company announced a $13.5M seed round and states it has raised $14.5M in funding since 2021. Founders Luke Kim and Phillip LeBlanc bring experience from Microsoft and GitHub and the company is actively hiring. Spice AI provides a developer-focused platform intended to simplify embedding AI/ML into production applications by surfacing primitives like reward functions and reusable manifests. The company emphasizes reward functions that let developers specify what an algorithm should optimize for, and is building a package manager called the Spicerack so developers can publish and reuse reward-function manifests. Spice AI is launching as an open-source project and plans a commercial edition with enterprise support, plus a hosted offering and private registries (called Spicepods) for enterprises. The target customers are professional developers rather than data science teams. The founding team includes CEO Luke Kim and CTO Phillip LeBlanc, who have prior engineering experience at Microsoft on projects including Dapr, Azure Active Directory, Visual Studio App Center and GitHub Actions. The company recently raised a $1 million seed round to support its early development and go-to-market efforts.