• Vega

  Participated · Seed · Oct 2019

  Vega is developing a protocol to enable non-custodial, peer-to-peer margin trading and decentralized derivatives markets with investment bank-grade risk management. The product is a bespoke trading-optimized sidechain (layer-2) designed for 10–100x faster execution than general-purpose blockchains. Key innovations include a fully automated end-to-end trading system, market-creator and market-maker fee incentives, and a framework for creating customizable financial products. The team plans to complete and test the first version of the core protocol, launch a private test network demonstrating margin trading imminently, and open a public testnet soon after. Vega will publish research on decentralized market fairness and trading-optimized consensus protocols, and disclose details about its validator/staking model, market-making incentives, and trading APIs. The company raised a strategic seed of more than $5M to support development and community initiatives.

• Vega

  Participated · Seed · Oct 2019

  Vega is a proof-of-stake protocol that positions itself as the derivatives layer for web3, enabling anyone to create flexible, custom-built derivatives markets. The protocol claims high throughput, instant settlement, and low-fee trading, and allows any blockchain to plug into Vega. Its product focuses on aligning incentives between passive and active liquidity providers and supporting both professional market makers and individual traders and SMEs. Vega aims to bridge traditional finance and DeFi, tackling issues such as MEV, capital efficiency, and scaling. The project emphasizes open, peer-to-peer markets and rapid innovation in derivatives. The company expanded its community to over 21,000 unique participants through a recent token sale. Vega is building a decentralized protocol for creating and trading derivatives markets, aiming to remove centralized gatekeepers and decentralize governance. The protocol seeks to enable instant settlement, reduce fees, eliminate conflicts of interest, and provide the throughput needed for high-volume derivatives trading. Founder Barney Mannerings launched the project in 2018; Vega launched a testnet in Q2 2020 and has iterated on it since. Its wallet software is free and open-source, and the company has issued roughly 500 hosted-wallet IDs for testnet access. Vega plans to use the new capital to ship and test high-quality code and is preparing a mainnet-ready release this summer, after which validators are expected to connect the Vega network to the Ethereum mainnet to enable trading of real crypto assets. Financially, the startup raised $5M in the latest round, bringing total disclosed funding to more than $10M per Crunchbase. Vega is developing a protocol for creating and trading derivatives on a fully decentralized, layer-2 network designed to avoid performance and market fairness issues on layer-1 blockchains. The protocol enables pseudonymous trading and rewards participants for creating new products and providing liquidity. The company is led by founder Barney Mannerings and is based in Gibraltar. Vega is focused on completing and testing the first version of its core protocol and is launching community initiatives to engage developers, traders, and ecosystem partners. The team expects to launch a private test network demonstrating margin trading with test assets imminently, with plans to expand into a publicly available testnet soon after. Vega raised more than $5M in seed funding to support these development and community efforts.

• Coinme

  Participated · Series A · Sep 2019

  Coinme is a Seattle, Washington–based licensed cryptocurrency cash network that offers an enterprise API to crypto-enable legacy financial institutions. Led by CEO Neil Bergquist, the platform enables the simple and secure sale of bitcoin for cash to everyday people. The company powers more than 15,000 locations in the U.S. through partnerships with MoneyGram and Coinstar. Coinme raised an additional $10M in a strategic funding round. Backers included existing investors such as Digital Currency Group. The company said the funds will be used for product and market expansion. Coinme operates a network of cryptocurrency ATMs and kiosks that enable customers to buy bitcoin, including a partnership with Coinstar. Founded in 2014 and based in Seattle, the company has more than 3,500 locations across 27 U.S. states. Transaction volumes have increased by more than 40% since late February. Coinme has 28 employees and expects to grow headcount by about 50% this year. The company says it will use the fresh capital to expand into Latin America and pursue integrations with existing payment platforms. Coinme operates a vertically integrated cryptocurrency platform combining a digital wallet, payment services, and a large bitcoin kiosk network. It powers over 2,600 kiosk locations through a partnership with Coinstar and is building decentralized finance (DeFi) services. The company offers retail-facing products for payments, remittances, and store-of-value use cases, plus Private Client services such as concierge trading, high-volume institutional transactions, and tax-advantaged crypto retirement options like Self-directed IRAs and Solo 401(k)s. Coinme plans to use new funding to obtain additional licenses to operate nationwide in the U.S., expand into key international markets, and continue integrating features into its online wallet to serve retail demand. Founded in 2014 and based in Seattle, Coinme focuses on blending kiosk, wallet, and payment services with decentralized assets.

• Coil

  Led · Seed · Aug 2019

  Coil operates a subscription payment platform (users pay $5/month) that routes micropayments to content creators in XRP or fiat via the Interledger protocol. The product automatically pays creators when users consume content on Coil-compatible sites; some top creators are already earning thousands of dollars a month and one creator, Riley Q, reported earning $3,400 in XRP. Coil runs a “Booster” program that awards XRP grants to top creators (collectively about $10,000 by May). The company has used its funding to pursue an aggressive growth strategy, including a $20 million investment in Imgur and an undisclosed investment in streaming startup Cinnamon, and a partnership with Puma Browser. Coil says Interledger will eventually support cash-out options for other cryptocurrencies. The company declines to specify overall user counts or the value of transactions facilitated.

• NEAR

  Participated · Equity · Jul 2019

  NEAR’s core product is NEAR Protocol, a public, sharded proof-of-stake blockchain that uses a consensus mechanism called Nightshade to achieve high throughput and predictable costs for decentralized applications. By offering features such as meta-transactions, contract-based accounts and gas-fee rebates at the protocol level, NEAR aims to make dApps almost as easy to build and use as traditional web apps. The company is led by competitive programming champions and veterans from Google, Facebook, Niantic and MemSQL; co-founder and CEO Alex Skidanov was MemSQL’s first employee, while CTO Illia Polosukhin contributed to Google’s TensorFlow. NEAR has launched a beta program to onboard a cohort of projects expected to deploy on the platform later this year. Fresh capital will be directed toward hiring additional engineers, expanding developer tooling and bringing the mainnet to market. Although no revenue or user figures were disclosed, the team emphasizes scalability and mainstream adoption as key objectives. Once launched, the protocol is intended to remove theoretical limits on network capacity by parallelizing computation across shards.

No current team members are available.