AWeb3VC - Funding Round Up #41

🗓️ Week of: Oct 8-14, 2023

Also be sure to follow me on Twitter @aweb3vc 🚀

(See "Funding Rounds" section for the complete list of deals)

$68M+ was raised across 12 funding rounds in Web3. This came as no surprise. As covered in Round Up #40, with the SBF trail entering its 3rd week, almost all the industry news and headlines are currently diverted. Coupled with rising geopolitical concerns, many companies are holding back on funding announcements despite deals still getting done. October, like this past summer, is shaping up to be very quiet.

Putting these factors aside, the industry did catch one potential tailwind, with the SEC choosing not to appeal the recent court decision on Grayscale's spot Bitcoin ETF. While there are no guarantees of eventual approval from the SEC, perhaps this could pave the way for the eventual approval of a spot Bitcoin ETF, introducing a new catalyst for capital flows into the crypto markets, signaling a better climate for Web3 startups and investors.

🏆 Largest Funding Round

➡️ Membrane Labs announced $20 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Point72 Ventures and also included participation from BH Digital, Jane Street, Flow Traders, QCP Capital, Two Sigma Ventures, Electric Capital, Jump Crypto, GSR, Belvedere Trading, and Framework Ventures.

Membrane is a technology platform offering enterprise-grade trading and lending applications for cryptocurrencies, integrated with a custody-agnostic settlement network. The company originally started by building a clearing, netting, and settlement engine that enabled institutions to easily settle trades regardless of their chosen custody option. Since then, the platform supports workflows encompassing collateral management, loans, OTC trades, and derivatives.

Why this matters?👉With the absence of centralized clearing parties, clearing and settlement in crypto remains an ever-evolving area in broader market structure. While DeFi, through automated market makers and liquidity pools, looks to introduce decentralized solutions, not all trading counterparties have the luxury to rely on these solutions (e.g., existing TradeFi players). Thus, solutions like Membrane offer the core trading infrastructure to streamline crypto institutional players' front and back-office operations. Moreover, with the void left by Silvergate's SEN and Signature's Signet, along with the slew of crypto custody options deployed by multiple market participants, Membrane stands to fill a significant gap by at least offering consolidated trade settlement reporting across varying custody solutions.

😎 Noteworthy Company

➡️ Robot Ventures is a (pre-)seed investor in fintech and crypto companies with significant ambitions and contrarian views. The venture firm was founded in 2019 originally as a DeFi scout fund by Robert Leshner, the founder of Compound Finance, and Tarun Chitra, the founder of Gauntlet Network. The firm has also added Hart Lambur as its third partner.

Since its launch, Robot Ventures has invested in over 60 companies and projects. Some of its most notable investments include Lido Finance, LayerZero, Nansen, and Optimism. Its typical check sizes are reported to range from $100K to $1M. The firm has also consistently co-invested with other leading crypto venture firms, such as Dragonfly, Coinbase Ventures, Polychain Capital, a16z, and Electric Capital.

According to 13F data, the firm is on its third fund. Some of the venture firm's earliest limited partners (LP’s) included Xpring (the venture arm of Ripple), Bain Capital Ventures, Galaxy Digital, and Paradigm.

Why this matters?👉While not the most active investor in 2023, nor the largest, Robot Ventures is certainly making its mark within the Web3 venture space. The firm has made over 20 investments so far in 2023, averaging almost one announced deal about every other week. Their investments have also covered a wide range of areas, including infrastructure, base protocols (L1's & L2's), DApps, DeFi, and SaaS. Considering the valuations we've seen this year so far, coupled with Robot's deal flow, I wouldn't be surprised if their third fund generates some impressive returns in the years to come.

💸 Funding Rounds

Top 15 Rounds

Want access to our complete dataset or propose an update? Contact: [email protected]

All Rounds

Ordinalsbot - Seed ($1M) | Creators and developers platform for inscriptions on Bitcoin’s Ordinals protocol: https://ordinalsbot.com/

Verisoul - Seed ($3.3M) | Tools to help businesses and communities stop fake users including bots, duplicate accounts, and fraudsters: https://www.verisoul.ai/

Neutral - Seed ($3.2M) | Exchange for environmental assets including tokenized carbon credits, renewable energy credits, and carbon forward contracts: https://www.neutralx.com/

Parsec - Seed+ ($4M) | On-chain data and analytics platform focused on DeFi and NFT markets: https://parsec.finance/

Untangled Finance - Seed ($13.5M) | Institutional focused private credit marketplace for tokenized real-world asset (RWA): https://www.untangled.finance/

Membrane Labs - Series A ($20M) | Cryptocurrency-focused prime brokerage and lending platform: https://membranelabs.com/

REPUBLIK - Seed ($6M) | Web3 content distribution and video platform that gives power back to creators and fans: https://republik.gg/

Beldex - Strategic ($3M) | Web3 ecosystem building decentralized privacy-preserving applications including, a private messaging app, a decentralized VPN service, an ad-free Web3 browser, and a cross-chain asset anonymizer: https://www.beldex.io/

Silks (aka. Game of Silks) - Seed+ ($5M) | Web3 fantasy thoroughbred horse racing gaming platform: https://silks.io/

Kino Studio - Seed ($2M) | Web3 film finance, community development, royalties processing, and IP discovery platform: https://www.kino.studio/

Account Labs - Seed+ ($7.7M) | Developer of self-custody wallets that leverage account abstraction including UniPass and Keystone: https://www.accountlabs.com/

Initia - Seed (Not Disclosed) | Layer 1 blockchain built using Cosmos with application-specific Layer 2 using Optimistic rollups and Move natively compatible: https://initia.xyz/

New Funds

No new funds announced this week

🙌 Cool Resources

Singal is a free tool for founders to find the investors and investors to attract the right deals. The platform was originally created by pre-seed and seed stage venture firm, NFX.

🐕 About

AWeb3VC is a source for venture funding news, emerging startups and trends across Web3. I've been closely following cryptocurrencies and digital assets since 2013 and started working in space since 2018. Now I'm on a mission to build the most extensive venture ecosystem for BUIDLERS in Web3, starting first by tracking those BUIDLERS1