Participated · Equity · Feb 2025

Raise is a pioneer in the global gift card market and blockchain-powered payments and loyalty, founded in 2013 and operating from Miami. Its core products include a consumer app, an exchange (GCX), B2B 'Raise for Business', and a proprietary blockchain-backed gift card program called Smart Cards. The company reports it has facilitated over $5 billion in transactions for nearly 7 million users and more than 1,000 retail partnerships, with activation and redemption across a network of over one million stores, websites, and applications. Raise plans a nine-figure commitment over the next several years to realize on-chain gift cards, expand the Retail Alliance Foundation, and seed the Raise blockchain network and alliance IP in partnership with BFG Labs. It is integrating DOT Wallet via a partnership with the Polkadot Community Foundation, partnering with WalletConnect to connect to wallets such as Coinbase, MetaMask, Phantom, and Trust, and expanding B2B partnerships including Citi Bank and BILT Rewards. The company has also appointed a new board including Marco Santori, George Ruan, Matt Maloney, and Bjorn Wagner to support execution of its roadmap. Raise operates a mobile wallet and the world’s largest gift card marketplace, letting consumers buy discounted gift cards or sell unwanted cards for cash. Since launching in 2013, the company has amassed millions of users, enabled over $1 billion in gross transactions, and helped members save more than $140 million. Raise partners with nearly 400 national brands and offers consumers access to over 3,000 brands through its iOS and Android mobile wallet, where users save an average of 12% per transaction. The company’s core product is a digital gift-card marketplace and a closed-loop mobile payments network that gives brands direct-to-consumer prepaid payment capabilities. Raise plans to use new capital to accelerate development of its closed-loop mobile payments network, deepen its focus on prepaid cards, and build a world-class retail partnerships team. The company has raised more than $147 million to date. Raise.com runs a C2C marketplace that connects buyers and sellers of unused or partially used gift cards and collects a 15% commission on sales. Founded in 2013, Raise launched on the web and saw rapid growth after releasing an iOS mobile app just ahead of the 2014 holiday season; the app already contributes 20% of company revenue and accounts for over half of card listings. By November the service had grown over 500% since its Series A, and in 2014 the company sold over a million gift cards; between November and year-end Raise grew over 50% in revenue and other metrics while user growth quadrupled. CEO George Bousis said January was outpacing December in double-digit percentages, driven in part by mobile users purchasing at point-of-sale. Raise plans to use new funding to expand its executive, marketing and engineering teams (engineering to be about half the business), invest in R&D to improve speed and ease of use, and increase marketing spend across SEO, SEM, display and traditional media. Longer-term the company is developing services for retailers to leverage aggregate, anonymized shopper data and has signed deals with over a dozen undisclosed retailers interested in targeting customers via the app. Raise.com operates a peer-to-peer marketplace where consumers buy and sell discounted gift cards, e-gift cards and store credit across more than 500 retailers. Sellers can list physical cards, e-gift cards and merchandise credit with a $10 minimum balance; Raise.com collects a flat 15% commission on each sale and charges an extra $1 for physical-card transactions. Physical gift cards represent roughly 10% of sales, and the site provides prepaid shipping labels, seller payouts by check or PayPal, and a 100% money-back guarantee to buyers and sellers. Raise.com spun off from CouponTrade in February and began roughly 2.5 years ago; it has grown to over 50 full-time employees and the company is described as profitable. The business targets the large U.S. gift-card market (about $115 billion) and an additional $200 billion in merchandise credit from returns. Planned product improvements include a gift-card pricing tool and a scannable barcode for purchased cards; the company intends to use new funding to support growth, marketing, advertising and hiring.

Led · Seed · Nov 2024

Hyperbridge is a Polkadot rollup and a cryptoeconomic coprocessor for secure, verifiable interoperability, providing on-chain and off-chain SDKs for cross-chain messaging (POST) and storage reads (GET). The project has launched its mainnet and the Gateway Token Bridge, enabling secure, scalable cross-chain token transfers, messaging, and state queries. It integrates with ecosystems including Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, Base, BNB Chain, zkVerify, Gnosis, and Bifrost, positioning the protocol for adoption by developers, DAOs, and DeFi projects. Hyperbridge sold over 52 million of its 100 million-token supply in an Initial Relayer Offering (IRO) and has extended the IRO deadline to February 28, 2025; the Token Generation Event is scheduled for Q1 2025. Early participants claimed a 50% bonus and a remaining 15% bonus is still available, indicating strong early demand. The BRIDGE token will be used to pay minimal transaction fees for cross-chain messages, storage queries, and state reads; fees fund incentives and rewards for relayers and block producers, the token is planned to have zero inflation, and it will also be used for governance. Hyperbridge is a blockchain interoperability protocol that launched its mainnet on Polkadot to enable secure, scalable, and verifiable cross‑chain communication. Developed by Polytope Labs, Hyperbridge ships native support for Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, Base, BNB Chain, and Gnosis, and provides on‑chain and off‑chain SDKs for messaging and storage reads. At launch it introduces Gateway, a token bridge plus arbitrary message passing and state query tooling that displaces multisig-based authentication with zk-proofs, zk-light clients, and storage proofs to achieve finality‑based security. The project completed two testnet cycles that processed more than 600,000 cross‑chain messages and enlisted 66 independent relayers, metrics cited to validate network robustness. Target use cases include non‑custodial native bridges, cross‑chain intents, multichain expansion for stablecoins, real‑world assets, DAO governance tokens, and other DeFi applications. Financially, Hyperbridge closed a $2.5M seed round led by the Web3 Foundation and Scytale Digital prior to the mainnet launch.

Led · Series A · Jan 2024

Cumulus Encrypted Storage System (CESS) provides a blockchain-powered decentralized storage and CDN infrastructure for Web3, enabling on-chain data sharing, value transactions, and DApp deployment. Led by Co-Founder and Chairman Nicholas Zaldastani, the platform emphasizes data sovereignty and user privacy through mechanisms such as Random Rotational Selection (R²S), Proof of Reduplication and Recovery (PoDR²), Multi-Format Data Confirmation (MDRC), and proxy re-encryption technology. CESS says R²S prevents miner concentration, enables low gas fees, and supports up to 10,000 TPS while incentivizing fair participation and candidate consensus miners. The company supports use cases including Metaverse, NFT, DeFi, streaming media, social media, gaming, RWA, and both Web2 and Web3 storage. The company intends to use the newly raised funds to provide decentralized data services for Web3, and it highlights proprietary technologies to ensure data integrity, availability, traceability and privacy.