AWeb3VC - Funding Round Up #56

🗓️ Week of: Jan 21-27, 2024

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

$196M+ was raised across 37 funding rounds in Web3. Despite a downturn in the crypto markets following the launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs, deal flow in Web3 venture remains robust. Infrastructure and financial services (i.e., CeFi) lead the week as the top segments attracting capital. This week also marks a growing number of Series A rounds and more companies raising again within the past 12 months signaling a potentially better funding environment.

Keeping our eyes on emerging trends, recent funding announcements show an increased focus on BRC20 ecosystem projects (related to Inscriptions on Bitcoin and Ordinals) and Bitcoin Layer 2 protocols. In the past month over a dozen companies and projects building within the Bitcoin ecosystem have obtained tens of millions in funding. This could indicate a potential surge in development and innovation around the world's largest cryptocurrency, especially given the broader institutional focus.

🏆 Largest Funding Round

➡️ Sygnum raised $40M in a strategic growth round led by Azimut Holding, a global asset management group, alongside other new and existing strategic and financial investors who were unnamed. The latest round increased the company's post-money valuation to $900M, which was a slight increase from $800M during their Series B funding in January 2022.

Sygnum is a regulated digital asset bank, founded on Swiss and Singapore heritage. Their services include: digital asset banking (trading, staking, lending, and custody), asset tokenization, asset management across multiple investment strategies, and B2B banking, which provides their digital asset banking product suite to other banks. They serve a variety of clients including institutional and private qualified investors, corporations, banks, and other financial institutions. The company reports managing over $4B in assets with more than 1,700 clients across 60 countries, including 15 banks and financial institutions using their B2B banking services.

Sygnum holds a banking and securities dealer license from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) in Switzerland, and a Capital Markets Services (CMS) licence from the MAS in Singapore. The group is also regulated in the established global financial hubs of Abu Dhabi and Luxembourg.

Why this matters?👉 Crypto’s institutional narrative continues to become more profound, particularly with the launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs in the U.S. This has led to financial services (i.e., CeFi) sector, becoming the 2nd largest sector for funding in the industry over the past year. Platforms like Sygnum, which offer crypto/banking-as-a-service, are increasingly seen as pivotal 'bridges' enabling traditional financial institutions to provide crypto-native services to their clients.

Notably, despite a challenging market, Sygnum achieved a slightly higher valuation in its recent funding round compared to its peak bull market valuation in 2022. This contrasts with the trend of flat or down-rounds experienced by many later-stage crypto companies in 2023, suggesting a potential improvement in valuations for 2024.

😎 Noteworthy Company

➡️ Doppel is a digital risk protection platform. Its software provides an AI-powered information defense by integrating with social media platforms, domain registrars, and digital marketplaces to proactively identify emerging threats and taking them down rapidly. Their products are designed to secure companies, brands, and individuals against various digital threats like impersonation attacks and include anti-phishing, VIP protection, threat intel, anti-piracy, and anti-counterfeiting. Initially, Doppel gained recognition for helping major NFT projects identify scams and has since expanded its services to cater to sectors including finance, crypto, retail, media, and government. Some notable clients include Coinbase, ARK Invest, and VSCO.

The company was founded by Kevin Tian and Rahul Madduluri who had previously worked together as software engineers at Uber. Recently the company raised $14M in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) alongside several industry leaders in information security.

Why this matters?👉 Doppel offers a product suite catered to an ever-expanding cohort of clients given the rise of scams, impersonations, and phishing attacks far too common in Web3. Most notable the company illustrates how targeting a specific industry like Web3 can be adapted to and serve a wider range of industries and provide an expanding addressable market. Certainly, this doesn’t apply to all Web3 products, but is relevant for security and other SaaS products (e.g., marketing) where lessons learned in Web3 open broader horizons.

💸 Funding Rounds

Top 15 Rounds

Want access to our complete dataset or propose an update? Contact: [email protected] … I may not respond right away and still working on a way to easily share the data. However, drop me a line and I’ll make sure you get first access as soon as its available to share.

All Rounds

Scallop - Strategic (Not Disclosed) | Peer-to-peer money market for the Sui ecosystem: https://www.scallop.io/

CCData (fka. CryptoCompare) - Strategic (Not Disclosed) | Global cryptocurrency market data and indices provider: https://ccdata.io/

Cadence - Strategic (Not Disclosed) | Intent-centric decentralized perpetual futures protocol and aggregator: https://www.cadenceprotocol.io/

AMBBi (aka. Art Meets Blockchain & Beyond Innovation) - Strategic (Not Disclosed) | BRC20 ecosystem project of twin assets compraised of an Inscription and NFT: https://www.ambbi.io/#/

BiHelix - Seed (Not Disclosed) | Turning-complete Bitcoin application infrastructure combing the RGB protocol and the Lightning Network: https://www.bihelix.net/

Scene Infrastructure (aka. Friends With Benefits) - Seed ($3M) | Software developer building better tools for socialization and expanding utility of the Friends With Benefits (FWB) ecosystem: https://www.sceneinfrastructure.com/

Veta Finance - Strategic ($2.9M) | Decentralized platform for structured products and margin trading: https://veta.finance/

Singular Protocol - Seed ($3M) | Cross-chain lending protocol protocol for NFTs, Real World Assets, and other digital assets: https://singularlabs.xyz/#/homeTab/home

Masa - Seed ($5.4M) | Decentralized marketplace and network for users' personal data secured by zero-knowledge (ZK) proof technology: https://www.masa.finance/

The Bagel Network - Seed ($3.1M) | Open protocol for humans and autonomous AI agents to collectively build, trade. and license machine learning datasets: https://www.bagel.net/

EDX Markets - Series B (Not Disclosed) | Digital asset marketplace designed to meet the needs of both crypto native firms and the world’s largest financial institutions: https://edxmarkets.com/

Polymer - Series A ($23M) | Interoperability hub for Ethereum, connecting Layer-2 networks using the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol: https://www.polymerlabs.org/

Zorp (aka. Nockchain) - Seed ($5M) | Proof-of-useful-work blockchain that sits atop a combinator-based virtual machine that can be efficiently used with zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs: https://zorp.io/

KEKKAI - Seed ($1.5M) | Web3 security product that detects potential dangers by analyzing transaction simulations: https://kekkai.io/

Arcade - Private Sale ($4.8M) | GameFi platform offering a chain-agnostic approach to engaging with various Play-to-Earn (P2E) games: https://www.arcade2earn.io/

Stan - Seed+ ($2.7M) | eSports fan engagement platform enabled by digital collectibles and NFTs: https://getstan.app/

Dinari - Seed+ ($2.5M) | Securities backed tokenization platform for corporate equities on-chain: https://www.dinari.com/

Doppel - Series A ($14M) | Digital risk protection platform used to protects brands against phishing, account takeovers, and other digital threats: https://www.doppel.com/

Ingonyama - Seed+ ($1M) | Semiconductor company, focusing on Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) hardware acceleration: https://www.ingonyama.com/

Synonym Finance - Seed ($1.5M) | Universal cross-chain credit layer for DeFi: https://www.synonym.finance/

BDACS - Strategic (Not Disclosed) | Digital asset custody and security services for investors and institutions in Korea : https://www.bdacs.co.kr/en

bitsCrunch - Strategic ($2.4M) | 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/

BitGo - Strategic (Not Disclosed) | Institutional digital asset financial services company that provides clients with security, custody, and liquidity solutions: https://www.bitgo.com/

Sygnum - Strategic ($40M) | Global digital asset banking group, founded on Swiss and Singapore heritage: https://www.sygnum.com/

CryptoSafe - Seed ($20M) | Web3 crowdfunding ecosystem for cryptocurrency and blockchain projects: https://www.cryptosafe.ai/

PECland - Private Sale ($600K) | BRC20-based metaverse: https://pecland.xyz/

Hyperline - Seed ($5.2M) | Fully managed blockchain data platform for analytics, data science, and machine learning workloads: https://www.hyperline.xyz/

B² Network - Seed (Not Disclosed) | Layer 2 solution for Bitcoin based on zero-knowledge proof verification: https://www.bsquared.network/

BitFlow - Seed ($1.3M) | Decentralized exchange that enables users to trade and earn using their Bitcoin: https://www.bitflow.finance/

Web3Intelligence (aka. Dopamine) - Private Sale ($4.5M) | Developer of a product suite of Web3 applications including, a non-custodial cryptocurrency investment app, influencer platform, and other data products: https://www.dopamineapp.com/

Axiom - Series A ($20M) | Zero Knowledge (ZK) coprocessor for Ethereum that enables smart contracts to access and process all on-chain data trustlessly: https://www.axiom.xyz/

10n8 Little Dragon - Public Sale ($1.5M) | Gamified DeFi protocol centered around BRC-20 projects: https://twitter.com/10n8BRC20

Arken Finance - Private Sale (Not Disclosed) | Abstraction layer for DeFi protocols offering trading and aggregation tools: https://arken.finance/

Spellborne (aka. Mon Studios) - Strategic ($1.4M) | Developer of a retro-style massively multiplayer monster catching and collecting adventure game: https://www.monstudios.co/

EMC (aka. Edge Matrix Computing) - Seed (Not Disclosed) | Decentralized edge computing protocol and network designed to serve AI applications: https://www.edgematrix.pro/#/home

Canaan - Private Placement ($25M) | Developer and manufacturer of ASIC Bitcoin mining equipment: https://www.canaan.io/

imgnAI - Seed ($1.6M) | Crypto-native generative AI platform: https://imgnai.com/

New Funds

No new funds this week.

🙌 Cool Resources

Blockworks Bitcoin ETF Tracker

🐕 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 the 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.