AWeb3VC - Funding Round Up #5

🗓️ Week of: January 29- February 4, 2023

Web3 Funding Snapshot

The Highlights

🚀This week in Web3 saw over $273M+ in funding across 32 announced rounds. Infrastructure remained the segment attracting the most funding, with 4 rounds going into mining companies specifically accounting for about 47% of the capital raised. It was also encouraging to see a number of Web3 security startups among this week's funding announcements (including Hypernative). I personally see this segment not receiving enough attention it deserves, as security is a crucial aspect to ensure a safe and sound future for Web3.

🏆Largest Funding Round ➡️ Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ), a leading digital asset miner in North America, announced a $70M loan from investment bank B. Riley. The financing comes as the company works to restructure its debt following its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in December 2022. Crypto miners got crushed in 2022 as the industry sunk into “crypto winter” with many struggling to to stay afloat. Thus, it comes as no surprise to see other miners announce funding this week. This included TeraWulf’s $32M private placement and Power.Re announced $27.2 million in combined Series A and strategic funding.

😎 Noteworthy Company ➡️ Hypernative, a crypto security startup, announced $9M in Seed funding led by Boldstart Ventures and IBI Tech Fund, with strategic investments from Blockdaemon, Alchemy, Borderless, CMT Digital, Nexo, and other angel investors. The company aims to prevent attacks and exploits against crypto protocols by monitoring on/off-chain data to predict threats before they occur. Its first product, Pre-Cog, has help users save "tens of millions of dollars" with a client base ranging from asset managers, hedge funds, traders, and market markers. They also plan to build other loss prevention tools aimed at offering end-to-end systems to mitigate other types of risk prevalent in crypto... Seeing Blockdaemon and Alchemy participate in the round only leaves room to speculate who else might be using Hypernative in the near future.

👀Observations & Trends ➡️ BUIDLER Season Refuted... While its been great to see funding continue to come into Web3, we should remain cautiously optimistic for 2023. This tweet thread from Regan Bozman of Lattice Fund and Dove Metrics really hammered this through:

In the thread, Bozman refutes the popular narrative that the crypto industry is thriving and that builders are continuing without interruption. Despite growth in developer activity and funding, many teams struggle to find product-market fit and have shut down or left the industry. Bozman predicts that 75% of 2020-2022 vintage crypto seed-stage companies will run out of money or be sold by 2024. This could be attributed to the fact the crypto industry still needs to focus on building products that people want. The era of "build it and they will come" is over. However, reasonably funded projects, focused on small market niches, and solving real problems could be the new recipe for the next wave of successful projects within Web3.

Funding Rounds

Top 15 Rounds

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

All Rounds

YGC Japan - Private Sale ($2.95M) | Blockchain gaming platform focused on the Japanese market originally founded by Yield Guild Games (YGG): https://ygg.jp/

Hypernative – Seed ($9M) | Security platform used to monitor on/off-chain data for protocols and decentralized applications in order to detect potential threats and prevent exploits or hacks in real-time: https://www.hypernative.io/

VitaDAO - Private Sale ($4.1M) | Community-governed and decentralized collective focused on funding research and drug development in the longevity space and the extension of human life and healthspan: https://www.vitadao.com/

Sovereign Labs - Seed ($7.4M) | Developer of software development kit (SDK) that makes it easier for developers to create interoperable zero-knowledge rollups that can be deployed on any layer 1 blockchain: https://www.sovereign.xyz/

Oh Baby Games – Seed ($6M) | Blockchain gaming platform that enables cross-game collectibles and is focused on integrating the lore, community, and stories of crypto Twitter into its games: https://ohbabygames.com/

Boundlesspay - Seed (Not Disclosed) | Digital wallet and debit card enables storing and spending of digital assets across merchants globally that also provides access crypto loans and investing in digital assets via DeFi and CeFi: https://www.boundlesspay.com/

Elven – Seed (Not Disclosed) | Web3 accounting and financial reporting platform that provides transparent, compliant, and auditable financial reporting services for Crypto projects and institutions: https://www.elven.com/

Polemix - Seed ($1M) | Web3 platform for ideas and opinions enables influential opinion leaders across subject matter allowing supporters to buy Proof of Support tokens (POSU) of the opinion leader's idea: https://polemix.io/

Rysk – Seed ($1.4M) | On-chain market making for DeFi derivatives using its Dynamic Hedging Vault (DHV) is a dynamic, a self-governing options automated market maker (AMM), generating uncorrelated returns for liquidity providers by trading options : http://rysk.finance

Addressable – Seed ($7.5M) | Marketing software for Web3 brands to boost user acquisition by bridging the gap between blockchain data and social media by offering tools to build audiences, launch campaigns and track growth: https://www.addressable.io/

Everscale – Strategic ($5M) | Peer-to-peer multi-blockchain system that offers unique properties, such as dynamic multithreading, soft majority consensus and distributed programming, it is also governed by a decentralized community founded upon meritocratic principles via Soft Majority Voting protocol: https://everscale.network/

bitsCrunch - Strategic (Not Disclosed) | AI-powered NFT analytics that provide comprehensive data-driven insights to fight wash trading, fraud and give accurate value for digital asset: https://www.bitscrunch.com/

Sec3 – Seed ($10M) | Web3 security provider focused on the Solana ecosystem offering security audit services and software to provide automated security audits: https://www.sec3.dev/

Squid – Seed ($3.5M) | Squid is the cross-chain swap and liquidity routing protocol on Axelar Network that utilizes existing decentralized exchanges (DEXs) to swap and send any native token between chains: https://www.squidrouter.com/

Nexus - Seed ($10M) | Developer of Support-a-Creator software for video game developers that enables the implementation of a suite of sales attribution, referral systems, global payouts, and taxes as well as performance data and analytics: https://www.nexus.gg/

Meta Masters Guild - Private Sale ($2.2M) | Mobile focused Web3 gaming guild focused on building high quality blockchain based and integrated mobile games allowing members to earn rewards in exchange for their contribution to the ecosystem: https://memag.io/en

RedPill Studio - Private Sale ($2.49M) | Publisher and developer of blockchain-based online games including Chimeras Metaverse and TrainCraft: https://redpilldev.tech/

Core Scientific - Debt ($70M) | One of the largest blockchain computing data center providers and miners of digital assets in North America, using its facilities and intellectual property portfolio for co-located and self-mining of digital asset: https://corescientific.com/

HolyWally - Debt ($1M) | Digital wallet-as-a-service platform that allows businesses to easily create while-label wallets that support traditional financial products and digital assets: https://www.holywally.com/

NetZylo - Seed ($3M) | Web3 platform that allows users to register and host Web3 domains, providing solution to securely store and trade NFTs, integrate crypto assets, and protect trademarks: https://netzylo.com/

TeraWulf - Private Placement ($32M) | Bitcoin miner that leverages sustainable energy sources with mining facilities across the US: https://www.terawulf.com/

Port3 Network - Seed ($3M) | Protocol to aggregate and standardize both off-chain and on-chain data in order to build a social data layer for Web3 that is universally accessible: https://port3.io/

MYSTiC GAMES – Seed ($1.3M) | Web3 game development studio creating integrated mobile games featuring free-to-own NFTs, earned organically through gameplay: https://mysticgames.dev/

Cohort - Seed ($3.52M) | Web3 SaaS solution that uses NFTs to help brands create experiences around their products without any tech or large time commitment: https://www.cohort.xyz/

Simba Chain - Grant ($30M) | A fully integrated development platform for enterprise and government developers to connect to Web3 by offering a low-configuration environment that auto-generates REST APIs capable of connecting to smart contracts on multiple blockchain protocols: https://simbachain.com/

Fungify - Private Sale ($6M) | Non-custodial NFT index and algorithmic lending protocol, allowing for instant NFT sales, immediate NFT-backed loans, and a yield-bearing NFT index token: https://www.fungify.it/

Archimedes - Seed ($4.9M) | Decentralized lending and borrowing marketplace that allows us users to deposits assets into vaults and use them as collateral to create leverage positions: https://archimedesfi.com/

Bibliotheca DAO - Public Sale ($3.9) | Developer of Realms a massively multiplayer on-chain composable game (MMOCCG) built on the layer2 StarkNet ecosystem: https://bibliothecadao.xyz/

Sumi Network - Seed ($3M) | Decentralized communication and storage offering a wallet to wallet messenger through the Substrate based blockchain system on Polkadot: https://www.sumi.network/

Blockjoy - Series A ($12M) | White label blockchain nodes as a service: https://www.blockjoy.com/

Pow.Re - Series A ($9.2M) | Proof-of-Work digital miner deploying high-density computing (HDC) data centers in proximity to sustainable stranded energy sources to produce hashing power: https://pow.re/

Pow.Re – Strategic ($18M) | Proof-of-Work digital miner deploying high-density computing (HDC) data centers in proximity to sustainable stranded energy sources to produce hashing power: https://pow.re/

New Funds

Breed VC - Breed Fund 1 ($20M)

Cool Resources

On the topic of security in Web3, I’d like to highlight the blog "Web3 is Going Just Great" by Molly White. This serves as a reminder of the importance of acknowledging the challenges and problems faced by the industry, as we strive to find solutions and help move Web3 forward.

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 BUIDLERS.