The Venture Codex

Led · Seed · Dec 2025

Harbor is a decentralized trading platform co-founded by AirSwap founder Michael Oved and former THORChain core engineer Pluto. The product is designed as high-performance, chain-neutral DeFi liquidity infrastructure that supports native asset cross-chain trading. It offers professional-grade matching and scalability features intended for integration by wallets and other decentralized applications. By focusing on native asset swaps, Harbor seeks to bypass wrapped tokens and reduce fragmentation across blockchains. The platform aspires to become a core liquidity layer for the broader DeFi ecosystem. Although still in its early stage, Harbor has secured outside capital to accelerate development. The $4.2 million strategic round provides the company’s initial disclosed funding and will be used to build out the protocol and expand ecosystem partnerships.

Participated · Seed · Sep 2025

Wildcat Labs develops the Wildcat lending protocol to enable undercollateralized, parameterizable loans onchain, targeting institutional borrowers like funds, market makers, and DAOs. The protocol does not underwrite loans itself; borrowers set reserve ratios, withdrawal cycles, and lender whitelists to create bespoke markets. Wildcat earns revenue via a 5% protocol fee on the APR offered by borrowers (e.g., a 10% offered APR costs the borrower 10.5%). Since its generalized V2 Ethereum mainnet release in February, the protocol has originated $368 million and currently handles $150 million in outstanding credit. The company is already profitable and currently operates with four employees and three contractors. Planned uses of new capital include deeper Ethereum integration, hiring four additional roles (two currently open), and building new market types and mechanisms to unlock high-quality yield opportunities.

Participated · Seed · May 2025

Velocity offers a stablecoin payments and treasury platform designed for global CFOs and treasurers, combining regulated stablecoins with traditional banking rails, compliance, custody, liquidity management and settlement orchestration. The platform aims to enable near-instant settlement, reduce prefunding requirements and improve liquidity management for merchants, payment providers, fintechs and financial institutions. Velocity positions its technology as a bridge between traditional payments/banking systems and stablecoin networks to fit existing treasury workflows. Founded in 2025, the company has raised nearly $50 million in capital since May 2025, including the $38 million Series A. Velocity plans to use the funding to expand its global banking and payments network, accelerate product development and deepen regulatory capabilities to support enterprise adoption.

Participated · Seed · Apr 2025

Optimum is building a decentralized memory layer for blockchains to make data storage, access and propagation faster, cheaper and more decentralized. Its core innovation is a decentralized coding method called Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC), developed by MIT professor Muriel Médard. The company invited creators from institutions like Harvard and MIT to transition from academia into the commercial crypto arena. Optimum's memory infrastructure targets inefficiencies such as redundant gossip networks, congested mempools and bloated nodes that make retrieval costly and slow. The offering is live on a private testnet and Optimum is inviting L1s, L2s, validators and node operators to try its memory layer. Optimum raised an $11 million seed round to advance its technology.

Participated · Seed · Apr 2025

Cap issues cUSD, a synthetic dollar backed by a basket of regulated stablecoins (including USDC, PYUSD, BUIDL, and BENJI) and mints stcUSD, a yield-bearing token for users who stake cUSD. The protocol separates yield generation from risk management across three participant groups: operators (institutional trading firms and market makers) who deploy yield strategies, restakers who underwrite operators via EigenLayer or Symbiotic and face slashing, and cUSD/stcUSD holders who sit above the risk stack. Idle reserve capital not borrowed by operators is deployed into platforms like Aave or Morpho to provide a base yield floor for stcUSD holders, and Cap runs Dutch auctions on slashed restaker collateral to replenish reserves after operator defaults. Cap's cUSD is deployed on Ethereum mainnet and MegaETH and the protocol has integrated with Pendle and Morpho to enable trading or collateralization of yield-bearing positions. The team reported raising $11 million in seed funding in April 2025 from institutional and market-making backers and originating a $100 million revolving credit facility to Susquehanna Crypto, with borrower adoption up 175% and total loans outstanding rising more than 300% in Q1 2026.