Participated · Seed · Jan 2024

Masa Network is building a decentralized, privacy-first marketplace for personal data that leverages zero-knowledge and fully-homomorphic encryption to preserve user privacy. The platform lets users contribute data and earn rewards in Masa's native token while granting developers permissioned access to train AI models and build applications. Masa describes itself as a “Decentralized Google” for personal data and emphasizes data sovereignty and fair compensation for creators. The project plans a Q1 mainnet launch on a dedicated Avalanche Subnet through a strategic partnership with Avalanche. Since launching in August 2022, Masa reports over 1 million connected wallets, more than 15 million permissioned data points, and over 23,000 testnet node operators, with early adoption from projects like Avalanche, QuickSwap, Injective, and Celo. Financially, Masa announced a $5.4M Seed round that brings total funding to $9.2M. The company was incubated by Coinlist’s Seed Program and Binance’s Most‑Valuable‑Builder Accelerator. Masa Finance is a hybrid credit protocol and decentralized credit bureau that aggregates off-chain and on-chain data to create non-fungible on-chain credit reports. The platform links traditional financial accounts and credit bureau data with crypto holdings and on-chain signals, integrating over 10,000 off-chain sources across 78 countries and 26 on-chain integrations (exchanges and wallets such as Binance, Coinbase, FTX, Gemini and MetaMask). Built on Celo and Ethereum, Masa aims to give users ownership and sovereignty over their credit history and eventually migrate governance to a DAO structure. The company is launching out of beta with about 36,000 people signed up, most users in sub‑Saharan Africa (notably Nigeria and Kenya), more than 2,100 node operators on its live testnet, roughly 300 developer registrations and seven projects registered to integrate. Masa is preparing credit products including a credit builder loan, uncollateralized loans and an SME line of credit through its app, and hopes to partner with lending protocols such as Goldfinch. Financially, Masa raised $3.5M in pre‑seed funding, reports double‑digit growth each month since the start of the year, and plans a seed round to fund hires, the protocol's production release, a public token sale, and scale-up of node operators and developer and lender onboarding.

Led · Seed · Dec 2023

Fyde Treasury, founded in Q3 2022 and based in London, provides a non-custodial “liquid vault” designed to help holders manage and scale on‑chain crypto treasury assets. Owners deposit various digital assets while retaining ownership and receive enhanced performance; the protocol uses a liquid vault token, $TRSY, to incentivize trading and provide a payment avenue. The platform addresses the four pillars of crypto treasury management: asset diversification, yield generation, token liquidity, and governance preservation. Fyde’s protocol launched on Ethereum in December 2023 and is stress‑tested and optimised by a simulation engine that uses heuristic and stochastic agent‑based modelling to design tokenomics and aligned incentive structures. The team includes a former NASA scientist and members with PhD and research backgrounds from Stanford, Cambridge, and UCLA, along with business degrees from London Business School. The company invites users to join during liquidity on‑ramping to accrue FYDE points and says recent funding will help advance its mission to manage multi‑billion dollar on‑chain treasuries.

Participated · Equity · Oct 2023

Surf Protocol is developing a permissionless perpetual-contract decentralized exchange (Perp DEX) on the Base network. The protocol aims to provide users with a broader set of tradable perpetual (Perp) assets. It also seeks to lower users' trading consumption and costs. Surf Protocol recently secured a $3 million strategic investment. The financing was led by ABCDE Capital, with participation from OP Crypto and C2 Ventures. The report cites IT桔子 (IT Juzi) as the source of the financing news.

Participated · Seed · Oct 2023

MyShell operates an interactive AI app store and model hub that lets users and creators build, share and integrate agents on multiple open-source foundation models. The platform emphasizes decentralization and open-source development and hosts projects such as OpenVoice, MeloTTS, and Allice. Led by CEO Ethan Sun, MyShell provides tools and an agent framework for complex AI development workflows. The company plans to use new funding to further develop its open-source models and agent platform for AI creators. MyShell reports over 1 million registered users and 50,000 creators on the platform and has attracted a range of community and investor support. MyShell operates a decentralized, integrated platform that enables discovery and creation of AI-native apps using generative AI capabilities such as large language models, image generation, and voice cloning. The company positions itself to make anyone a “super creator” of AI-native applications regardless of technical skill. MyShell plans to use recent funding to develop proprietary AI models, build a Creator Studio for AI-native apps, and establish a creator ecosystem on the blockchain. The platform has rapidly grown a community of over 400,000 users and 30,000 creators, which the company cites as the largest AI community within Web3. Financially, MyShell completed a $5.6 million seed funding round in October 2023 to support these product and ecosystem initiatives.

Participated · Equity · Dec 2022

Nillion builds a privacy-focused blockchain service around the concept of "blind computing," which allows data to be processed without exposing its contents. Its technology is designed to enable ecosystems of applications to cooperate while keeping sensitive information concealed. The company is positioning itself at the intersection of blockchain and AI, aiming to support use cases where large amounts of data must be shared and stored securely. Nillion lists partnerships with blockchain networks including NEAR, Aptos, Arbitrum, Ritual and others. The team says its offering addresses needs for upgraded rails for secure storage and computation as AI and decentralized data converge. Financially, the company recently raised capital to expand its blind computing efforts. Nillion is building a non-blockchain decentralized network that provides infrastructure for securing storage and data computation. Its technology centers on Nil Message Compute (NMC), a cryptographic primitive developed by the team’s chief scientist, Miguel de Vega. The startup says the network enables very fast computations of secured data and storage that blockchains cannot handle, and its early writings indicate a token is planned for the future. Nillion was founded in November 2021 and bootstrapped until this raise; it currently has more than 40 employees. The company has signed over 30 letters of intent with potential customers across decentralized exchanges, layer-1 projects, AI/ML firms, legal and healthcare organizations. Short-term plans include delivering an end-to-end prototype within weeks, launching an initial suite of products and a public network by the end of next year, and hiring engineering talent to build the technology.