Participated · Equity · Jan 2024

Mon Studios is a game developer. The company completed a $1.35M strategic financing. Participating investors include 32-Bit Ventures, Momentum 6, Yunt Capital, D64 Ventures, and County Capital. The round also featured investments from founders and senior executives at Animoca Brands, YGG, Faze Clan, Immutable, and Tatsumeeko. The financing was reported by DoNews on January 29, 2024.

Participated · Seed · Jan 2023

Rysk Finance is a London-based on-chain market maker focused on DeFi derivatives. Its signature product, the Dynamic Hedging Vault (DHV), is a dynamic self-governing options AMM that trades options to generate uncorrelated returns for liquidity providers. The company says DHV resolves industry complexity around generating higher returns per unit of risk for liquidity providers. Rysk raised $1.4M in a pre-seed round to enhance platform security, drive engineering and research, and expedite the launch of Rysk Beyond, an advanced decentralized market maker protocol for options trading. The team is led by Dan Ugolini. Rysk’s stated mission is to expedite DeFi risk maturity while expanding adoption of sustainable yields.

Participated · Series B · Oct 2022

Zerion provides a smart Web3 wallet and investing tool that aggregates across major wallets, networks and decentralized exchanges to give users a single point of entry for managing digital assets and NFTs. The product emphasizes user-centered design and a technology stack that aggregates liquidity and trading options. Since adding swaps, trading volume through Zerion has grown from $47M in 2019 to more than $1.5B today. The company launched its wallet in May, accompanied by a generative NFT that evolves as users make transactions, and more than 60k Zerion wallets holding over $100M were created within six months of the launch. The interface serves roughly 400K monthly active wallets from over 150 countries. Zerion intends to use the new funding to advance development of its wallet and continue turning the wallet into the primary interface for Web3 users. Zerion builds a DeFi “interface” that lets users access more than 50,000 digital assets and 60 protocols on the Ethereum blockchain through mobile and web apps. The product streamlines DeFi interactions while letting users transact from their own wallets (e.g., MetaMask), so Zerion does not control user funds or private keys. Its iOS and Android apps have become popular for tracking tokens and positions, with the average user opening the app more than nine times per day. The company has processed more than $600 million in transaction volume so far this year and now reports over 200,000 monthly active users. Zerion aims to demystify the fragmented DeFi landscape by unifying token and protocol access in a single UI. The startup positioned this growth as a driver for recent venture interest and capital deployment. Zerion offers a platform for cryptocurrency deposits and loans. The startup's interface facilitates access to decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols; commenters note it functions primarily as an interface to DeFi on Ethereum. Users log in via noncustodial wallets such as MetaMask and Coinbase Wallet, and the platform reportedly has no access to users' funds. The company recently raised $2 million to develop the platform. Article commenters debated the market opportunity, with some calling the market oversaturated while others praised the product's UX and rarity of decentralized-access interfaces. One commenter also noted that a clear business model has not yet been presented.

Led · Series A · Apr 2022

Composable Finance is a Berlin-based DeFi company that builds a hyper liquidity infrastructure layer for DeFi assets powered by Layer 2 Ethereum and Polkadot. Its core product is a development and execution environment that deploys orchestration logic to enable ecosystem-agnostic, decentralized cross-blockchain communication. Composable has procured parachains on Polkadot (Composable Parachain) and Kusama (Picasso Parachain) and developed Mosaic (a transfer-availability layer), Centauri (an IBC Substrate bridge to the Cosmos ecosystem), and Pablo (a decentralized exchange on Picasso). Future capabilities include cross-chain computing via a cross-chain virtual machine (XCVM) and a Routing Layer to let smart contracts span multiple ecosystems and support institutional throughput. The company raised $32M in a Series A and intends to use the proceeds to expand the team and build products for the blockchain and Web3 industry. Named team members include Rob Zhuang (Head of Operations), Zain Awan (CMO), and Karel Kubat (CTO). Composable Finance develops interoperable DeFi primitives and tooling on Substrate to enable cross-chain applications across Polkadot, Kusama and other ecosystems (it has also built a bridging primitive, Centauri, for the Cosmos-verse). The project operates an incubation arm, Composable Labs, which is launching native protocols such as Instrumental Finance, Arturo, Angular Finance and Bribe on its Picasso parachain, and has introduced products including Mosaic, Centauri and Mural. Composable emphasizes blockchain-agnostic infrastructure and first-mover positioning in DotSama while continuing to expand its developer tooling and SDK to drive interoperability. The team has grown development headcount by over 30% in the prior three months, underscoring active hiring and product buildout. Financially, the protocol secured significant auction financing via native token contributions and has supported spinouts (for example, Bribe closed a $4M private financing round). Composable was incubated by Advanced Blockchain AG and works closely with that firm through Composable Labs to source and scale new projects. Composable Finance is building infrastructure to enable cross-chain and cross-layer interoperability within decentralized finance. Advanced Blockchain AG and Rarestone Capital helped incubate the project, providing technical incubation and intellectual property support. Advanced Blockchain invested $2 million via a subsidiary and led a $7 million funding round that closed at a $35 million valuation. As compensation, Advanced Blockchain will receive 5.7 million Composable tokens (of a 100 million total supply) and a share of fees from Composable's intended Polkadot parachain; it may also use the parachain for its own projects. The funding is intended to advance Composable's infrastructure and to support its bid for a Polkadot parachain slot in the summer 2021 auction. Other participants in the round included Divergence Ventures, New Form Capital, DFG, Maven 11, 4SV, Hypersphere Ventures, Blockchain Capital, PNYX Ventures, CMS Holdings, Alameda Research, SOSV, Spartan Group, LedgerPrime, LongHash Ventures, Cluster, and Pluto Digital Assets.