Participated · Seed · Apr 2025

Firefish operates a bitcoin-collateralized lending marketplace that provides instant USDC loans to users in the U.S. and across global markets and also supports EUR and CHF. The platform serves retail and institutional users and uses multi-sig escrow to eliminate counterparty risk. It has processed over $100M in volume and has more than 10,000 users. Founders Igor Neumann and Martin Matejka lead the company from Prague. Braiins, one of the seed backers, recently used Firefish to secure a $400,000 loan, leveraging Bitcoin instead of selling. Firefish intends to use the new funding to further scale its Prime institutional lending program.

Participated · Seed · May 2024

Zest Protocol provides a lending protocol built specifically for Bitcoin, enabling users to deposit BTC through native Bitcoin transactions and then engage in lending or yield-generating activities. The company leverages upcoming Stacks Nakamoto and sBTC blockchain upgrades to create a fully Bitcoin-native lending experience. Using sBTC’s peg-in wire format, users deposit BTC to fund their balance on Zest Protocol. Its lending infrastructure is currently live on Stacks mainnet with Stacks market as it prepares for the sBTC launch. The company says it will use the funds to expand operations and development efforts. Zest Protocol is based in George Town, Cayman Islands and raised $3.5M in seed funding.

Participated · Seed · Aug 2023

Xverse is a Bitcoin Web3 wallet that provides first-class support for Ordinals, NFTs, BRC-20 inscriptions, DeFi and decentralized applications. The wallet is available on iOS, Android and desktop as a Chrome extension, and supports layer-1 Bitcoin and layer-2 networks like Stacks, with planned Lightning Network support. Xverse recently added Ledger hardware wallet support to offer cold-storage security options for Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens. The company says it has surpassed 350,000 downloads. Xverse intends to use its new funding to accelerate advanced features around DeFi, Stacks, Lightning and other Bitcoin scalability solutions. The product is led by founder and CEO Ken Liao and is based in Hong Kong.