Participated · Seed · Dec 2025

PG Labs (株式会社PGL) positions itself as a "Public Goods" Web3 studio dedicated to "putting every asset on-chain." The company offers end-to-end planning, development, global marketing, and treasury support for Web3 projects built on Ethereum and its Layer-2 ecosystem. A core in-house product is Pheasant Network, an interoperability protocol that connects Ethereum with more than 30 Layer-2 networks and has already processed over ¥30 billion in cross-chain transactions using its proprietary “Optimistic Interoperability” design. PG Labs has received multiple grants from the Ethereum Foundation, Optimism Foundation, Polygon Labs, and other Layer-2 projects, validating its technical contributions to public-goods infrastructure. With fresh seed funding, the company will double down on Pheasant Network development, expand research on Ethereum and Layer-2 technologies, and scale its enterprise support services in Japan. Approximately half of its newly raised capital is held in ETH and USDC, and part of the idle treasury will be actively managed to reinforce its financial base.

Participated · Seed · Dec 2025

LayerBank operates a universal on-chain money market that supports more than 150 markets across 17 blockchains spanning EVM, Move, and BTC ecosystems. Its platform enables users to lend, borrow, and deploy sophisticated yield strategies through a single, chain-abstracted interface. The company claims a community of over 693,000 users, underscoring early traction and network effects. LayerBank’s forthcoming native token, $ULAB, underpins its value-accrual model with ve-boosted rewards, fee redistribution, and buy-back-and-lock mechanics designed to align users with platform growth. Proceeds from its recent financing will fund the $ULAB Token Generation Event (TGE) on Movement Network and accelerate rollout of additional automated, user-centric DeFi products. Future plans include bringing deeper liquidity, real-world-asset (RWA) exposure, and more intuitive lending flows to Movement Network. By positioning itself as “the universal liquidity layer,” LayerBank aims to scale capital efficiency and real yield across both DeFi and RWA markets.

Participated · Series B · Mar 2024

Espresso Systems is a remote startup developing a shared sequencing marketplace and the HotShot finality gadget to connect and provide finality for layer-2 scaling solutions. In the marketplace, rollups can sell the right to build their blocks to proposers who bid for those rights, and proposers can bid on multiple rollup blocks to become shared proposers across chains. This shared sequencing model is intended to facilitate cross-chain activity and allows participation by anyone, including L1 proposers and rollup DAO-appointed sequencers. Rollups that prefer not to manage sequencing can outsource it to Espresso. The HotShot finality gadget offers lightning-fast finality on proposed blocks to preserve user experience. Espresso raised $28M in a Series B and plans to use the funds to continue product development. Espresso Systems is developing a layer-one blockchain that leverages zero-knowledge proofs and ZK-Rollups to boost throughput and lower gas fees while aiming to preserve decentralization. The team is focused on integrating roll-ups with consensus to avoid centralizing critical transaction data. Its core privacy product is CAPE (Configurable Asset Privacy for Ethereum), a smart-contract application that lets asset creators set customizable viewing and freezing policies. CAPE will debut on the Ethereum testnet in the near term and is planned to run natively on the Espresso blockchain; the company is also building a bridge to Ethereum to move assets between chains. The project is led by CEO Ben Fisch, COO Charles Lu, chief scientist Benedikt Bünz and CSO Jill Gunter, and employs 26 people, 18 of whom are engineers. Espresso aims to serve use cases such as private stablecoins for institutions that need a balance of privacy and compliance.

Participated · Equity · Feb 2024

Ultiverse is an AI-powered platform for crypto game production and publishing based in Singapore. The company integrates existing large language and generative models such as GPT-4, Llama and Stable Diffusion to train in-game NPCs and enable players to create AI agents, aiming to accelerate production and user adoption. Ultiverse says AI integration has reduced the time and cost to produce the same amount of content compared with prior processes, though the article notes other studios can adopt similar tools. The startup has published three games, including a mobile cricket title with 200,000 unique active wallet addresses; across all its games it reported 7.3 million registered users as of December and average monthly active users of 830,000. Using account abstraction, Ultiverse has onboarded mostly non-crypto users who previously did not hold wallets, helping convert web2 gamers into its ecosystem. The company recently completed a strategic funding round to support its growth and publishing efforts.