The Venture Codex

Led · Series A · Jun 2024

Aperture Finance is a decentralized finance platform pioneering AI-powered intents. The company is based in Sunnyvale, CA. It focuses on applying AI to enable intent-driven DeFi interactions. Aperture announced a $6.7 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Skyland Ventures, Blockchain Founders Fund, and Krypital Group, with participation from Alchemy, SNZ, Stratified Capital, Tide, Cipholio, ViaBTC, CatcherVC, and Double Peak. The article does not provide revenue, user metrics, or detailed plans for the use of proceeds.

Participated · Seed · Apr 2024

Raiinmaker is described in the coverage as a Web3 artificial intelligence company. The company completed a $7.5 million seed financing, as reported by Foresight News citing The Block. The seed round was co-led by Jump Capital and Cypher Capital. Other investors named in the articles include Gate.io Labs, MEXC Global, Krypital Group, Alphabit, Launchpool, New Tribe Capital, Coach K, Axia 8 Ventures, Sheesha Finance, Andromeda Capital, Arcanum Capital, GDA Capital and Alpha Sigma Capital. The published coverage centers on the fundraising and investor participation. The articles do not provide further detail on product specifics, roadmap, operating metrics, founding year, location, or prior financings.

Participated · Seed · Feb 2024

ZeroLend is a decentralized lending protocol that focuses on DeFi lending, RWAs, privacy, and account abstraction. It is currently the largest lending protocol on zkSync and the third-largest on Manta by total value locked (TVL). The project plans to launch its native governance token ZERO in Q1 2024 and run a series of airdrop initiatives under its Zero Gravity campaign to engage users. ZeroLend reports rapid growth, with TVL rising roughly 1500% from $3 million to $50 million and averaging around 100k daily active users. The protocol highlights integrations with Pyth and potential future integrations across the Manta and zkSync ecosystems. Development and expansion have been incubated by MahaDAO and are funded in part by recent seed and private round financing.

Participated · Equity · May 2022

BitCoke Exchange is a centralized cryptocurrency exchange focused on derivatives trading. It is regarded as the world's first Quanto swap crypto exchange and offers trader‑centric features such as fair matching, fast execution, and low fees. Original products include its Quanto swap, proprietary chart, and fund management system, which have made it popular among traders, funds, and asset management firms. BitCoke has long ranked in the top 10 by volume on the CoinMarketCap derivatives marketplace. In early 2022 the exchange raised $20 million in a strategic private round to accelerate development and to design features connecting centralized exchanges (CEX) with decentralized exchanges (DEX), and to promote its native token. Company leadership said the institutional investment underscores BitCoke's growth potential and will help explore merging CEX and DEX models.

Participated · Seed · Feb 2022

Aperture operates a cross-chain DeFi investment ecosystem centered on a smart-contract-enabled marketplace for yield and investment strategies, with integrated bridge solutions to connect opportunities across blockchains. Its product aims to let retail and institutional users execute complex, multi-step DeFi strategies with near one-click smart contracts, removing the need for multiple wallets or tokens. Aperture positions its marketplace to abstract away the complexities of cross-chain yield strategies and harmonize liquidity across networks. A private beta launched on Feb 7, 2022 featuring a delta-neutral strategy on synthetic stock tokens, and the company planned a V1 product launch in March to enable EVM-compatible chains to access Terra ecosystem opportunities. The team is Silicon Valley–based, with three co-founders from Stanford, Cornell, and UC Berkeley and 20+ years of combined product and engineering experience at Google, AWS, and Netflix. Aperture also intends to run a token generation event and will release further product details on its official channels.