Participated · Series A · Jul 2026

KOR Protocol offers an end-to-end platform intended to serve as a clearinghouse for creative assets and talent in the AI era. Its product stack centers on three layers—production (establishing origin, authenticity, ownership, and clearance), distribution (intelligence and workflow tools to route talent and content), and monetization (payments, splits, licensing flows, and revenue management). Several apps already build on the protocol, including KORUS (music remixing and release packs), Pacer (an AI operating system for music release and audience management), VRSNS, Streamline, and KOR Hubs. Since launch the company reports over 1 million lifetime sign-ups, 400,000 connected wallets, 1,000+ IP partners (including Black Mirror, Beatport, mau5trap, Imogen Heap, Banijay Group, and KDDI), and more than $2 million in gross revenue. Ritty Quin was appointed CEO late in the prior year to lead the company’s growth across technology and the creator economy. KOR intends to expand licensed IP supply, deepen its protocol and products, scale partnerships across music and entertainment, and onboard more creators and commercial partners as it builds toward a larger network rollout.

Participated · Series A · Oct 2024

Bluesky operates a social network and an open social ecosystem built on the AT Protocol (ATProto) that enables interoperable apps. Since its Series A, the platform has grown from 13 million to over 43 million global users and its Atmosphere network contains around 20 billion public records. The developer ecosystem is expanding, with over 400,000 monthly downloads of developer tools (SDK) and more than a thousand apps on ATProto used weekly. Bluesky has not integrated cryptocurrencies and is not built on blockchain technology, though some crypto-oriented investors have backed the company. Leadership changed when CEO Jay Graber transitioned to chief innovation officer, and the company says it is hiring a new CEO to drive commercial growth. The company is using recent funding to scale its team and continue development of its app and underlying protocol.

Participated · Equity · Mar 2024

Sophon is building an application ecosystem for gaming, social, AI, and prediction-market use cases with the goal of changing how users live, play, create, and connect in the internet economy. The platform leverages the ZK Stack and native account abstraction to provide a “gasless” user experience. Sophon is built on the zkSync codebase, described in the article as a battle-tested zkEVM with steady throughput and cost metrics important for scalable consumer applications. The project was incubated by Merit Circle and has partnerships with Beam, Zentry, Aethir and other expected partners; its mainnet is expected to launch soon. Reported funding will be used to boost ecosystem growth, recruit talent, and enable development of projects that connect entertainment, creativity, community, and technology. Sophon positions itself to cultivate an ecosystem that transcends mere financial incentives and to equip developers with tools to accelerate their applications. Sophon is an entertainment-focused blockchain ecosystem built as a rollup network atop Ethereum using zkSync technology and Celestia for data availability. The project sold node licenses as ERC-721 NFTs in a node sale that netted roughly 20,391 ETH (about $62.7M) from about 121,000 nodes out of 200,000 offered. Node holders can operate or delegate nodes and collectively qualify to earn 20% of the project’s future SOPH token distribution over the first 36 months after mainnet launch, expected in Q3. The sale used tiered pricing (Tier 1 at 0.0813 ETH up to Tier 11 at 0.2524 ETH), saw about three-quarters of nodes sold to whitelisted buyers, and imposed a 12-month transfer restriction on purchases. Unsold or unused node licenses at sale end will be burned, and project officials said the network does not require the full 200,000 nodes. The team is semi-anonymous, citing co‑founders including Sebastien (“Seb”) (formerly head of DeFi at zkSync) and Pentoshi, and previously raised $10M in a traditional round led by Paper Ventures and Maven 11 with participation from Spartan, SevenX and OKX Ventures. Sophon markets itself as a modular blockchain, but the project’s technical details and value proposition remain largely undisclosed in public channels. The team has shared only a handful of tweets and an enigmatic X bio, leaving specifics blank. Despite the secrecy, Sophon says it is building via strategic collaborations and has attracted interest from multiple industries. The project has raised $10 million from a consortium of investors, giving it early financial backing. Several projects are rumored to be building on Sophon in gaming and AI, and the team indicates more details will be revealed in due course. Investors and angels supporting Sophon describe the undertaking as innovative and impactful.

Participated · Seed · Mar 2024

Karma3 Labs is building OpenRank, a decentralized reputation protocol that enables developers and web3 protocols to provide ranking, recommendation, and reputation services on‑chain. OpenRank lets developers permissionlessly compute on reputation graphs constructed from on‑chain or peer‑to‑peer social graph data and supports graph algorithms such as EigenTrust. The protocol leverages zero‑knowledge proving systems to make graph‑algorithm computation verifiable and cost‑effective, and aims to be Sybil‑resistant, open‑source and permissionless. Early use cases cited include community ratings for app marketplaces like MetaMask Snaps, ranking and recommendation APIs for Lens and Farcaster, on‑chain discovery feeds for wallets, and reputation‑based voting and governance. Karma3 plans to use the $4.5M seed to broaden adoption across early use cases and to launch protocol v1 for developers. The team positions OpenRank as a foundational reputation compute layer intended to reduce centralized gatekeeping and power decentralized web‑of‑trust experiences.

Participated · Seed · Feb 2024

Avail operates a data availability network that helps blockchains store transaction and other information cheaply and in an easy-to-reference manner, particularly to support layer-2 rollup networks. Its technology offloads data from main chains, reducing burden and lowering costs for end-users. The company is building an Unification Layer, a modular stack combining data availability, aggregation, and shared security to enable modular blockchains to scale and interoperate permissionlessly and securely. Avail is also developing a Fusion Security layer intended to allow cryptocurrencies like ether (ETH) and bitcoin (BTC) to contribute to the ecosystem’s security; Fusion is expected to go live in early 2025. The new capital will be used to accelerate development, expand global presence, and address blockchain fragmentation, insufficient data availability, and limited scaling in Web3. Financially, Avail announced a $43M Series A and had disclosed a $27M seed round three months earlier. Avail is a Web3 modular blockchain services provider that aims to enable modular execution layers to scale and interoperate with minimal trust. The company focuses on simplifying the rollup experience and providing a unified, efficient platform for users and developers from any ecosystem. Its core offering targets modular execution and cross-ecosystem interoperability. Avail positions itself to reduce trust assumptions between layers while streamlining rollup integration. Financially, the company recently completed a $27 million seed funding round led by Founders Fund and Dragonfly.