Participated · Seed · Jul 2024

Redpill is a decentralized AI technology innovation platform that functions as a permissionless LLM router network. The platform provides seamless integration between a variety of AI models. Users can customize their AI interactions and route requests based on performance, cost, or efficiency. Redpill intelligently routes queries to the best-suited large language model. The company recently completed a $5 million seed funding round announced in July 2024.

Participated · Series A · Jul 2024

Chainbase is a blockchain data network. The company provides infrastructure focused on blockchain data. It announced a $15M Series A round led by Tencent Investment Group and Matrix Partners China. Other investors included Folius Ventures, Hash Global, JSquare, Mask Network and Bodl Ventures. The company said the round was completed in the fourth quarter of last year and was structured using a mix of equity financing and token warrants. With this financing its total funding to date is $18M; the company declined to comment on valuation.

Participated · Seed · Jun 2024

Mint Blockchain provides an Ethereum L2 network tailored for the NFT industry, offering underlying infrastructure services such as NFT issuance, trading, indexing, and storage. It is built on the OP Stack and is EVM-compatible so developers in the Ethereum ecosystem can extend projects to the Mint network. The network was jointly launched by NFTScan Labs and the MintCore developer team and its mainnet launched in May 2024. Mint is designed with NFT assets and holders in mind and supports one-stop services for Web3 developers. The company reports more than 400,000 active users worldwide and support for 80+ applications. It intends to use new capital to fuel global market brand building and further NFT infrastructure development.

Participated · Seed · Aug 2023

Linera is a San Francisco-based, low-latency blockchain that scales via microchains to bring web2-like scalability to web3 applications. Its architecture removes mempools and minimizes validator interactions to optimize performance and enable horizontal scalability for use cases with many parallel active users, such as retail payments, gaming micro-payments, messaging, proprietary trading, and bridges. The team, led by founder and CEO Mathieu Baudet and COO Bernadette Cay, has made an initial SDK available for Rust developers. Linera raised an additional $6M in Seed funding, bringing total seed proceeds to $12M. The company plans to use the funds to expand its team, launch a devnet and a testnet, foster a strategic presence in the APAC region, and continue growing its developer academy.

Participated · Equity · Jul 2023

Shardeum is a scalable EVM-based layer-1 blockchain that deploys dynamic state sharding. Its dynamic state sharding approach keeps gas fees low and TPS high as participation grows by performing consensus at the transaction level and lowering the computational power required for validator nodes. This consensus mechanism aims to allow anyone to run a node and increase decentralization. The company intends to use the $5.4M in new funding to expand operations and accelerate development efforts. Operating metrics on the testnet as of July 7, 2023 include over 7.4 million transactions, 820K+ accounts and more than 230K contracts deployed. Shardeum raised an $18.2M seed round in October 2022 from investors including Jane Street, Big Brain Holdings, Struck Crypto, The Spartan Group, Ghaf Capital, DFG, CoinGecko Ventures and Foresight Ventures. Shardeum is a remote, EVM-based Layer 1 blockchain that implements sharding to increase transactions per second as nodes are added while retaining atomic cross-shard composability. The protocol emphasizes low gas fees forever and leverages dynamic state sharding to balance decentralization and security. Founded by Nischal Shetty and Omar Syed, the company raised $18.2M in Seed funding. Backers include Jane Street, Struck Crypto, The Spartan Group and a broad group of institutional and angel investors. The company plans to use the funds to further enhance its dynamic sharding technology, accelerate ecosystem development, and focus on product and design improvements. It will also expand research and marketing efforts and host hackathons in India and the U.S. to incentivize developers to build on the platform.