AWeb3VC - Funding Round Up #72

🗓️ Week of: May 12-18, 2024

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

$186M+ was raised across 27 funding rounds in Web3. Crypto markets experienced a slight uptick following positive inflation news in the US and hopes of an eventual rate cut later in 2024. The Web3 venture ecosystem appears unchanged, with the amount of deal flow remaining close to the three-month average. In terms of segments, DeFi saw a slight uptick this week, reaching its highest level in over a month. This increase was largely led by major funding rounds from Polymarket and Re, which are covered in this edition.

🏆 Largest Funding Round

➡️ Polymarket announced $45M in a Series B funding led by Founders Fund. Other investors in the round included 1confirmation, ParaFi, Dragonfly Capital, and Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin. The round also follows a previously undisclosed $25 million Series A round in 2022 led by General Catalyst alongside Polychain and other angel investors.

Polymarket is a decentralized predictions market built on Polygon. The marketplace allows users to speculate on a wide range of real-world events, from political outcomes, cultural phenomena, and events impacting crypto markets. Users interact with the platform by depositing USDC, into their Polymarket wallets, then buying and selling Outcome Tokens for specific predictions markets. Each token’s price represents the probability of that outcome occurring, with successful predictions being cashed out at $1 per token.

Why this matters?👉 Prediction markets have long been an economist’s Shangri-La. Polymarket represents one of the most successful attempts at scaling a prediction market, partially enabled by blockchain technology. In recent years, the marketplace has gained a foothold in forecasting the outcomes of political elections, especially within the US. This has contributed to the platform's rapid growth and adoption, which has already seen over $100M in bets placed so far on the 2024 US presidential election. Given the sometimes speculative nature of these markets, combining prediction markets with crypto seems like a match made in heaven.

😎 Noteworthy Company

➡️ Re is a decentralized reinsurance marketplace. This platform is enabled by an underlying smart contract protocol built on the Avalanche blockchain, which acts as a global transaction layer for various insurable risks. Re accommodates a wide range of real-world insurance needs including general liability, commercial, workers' compensation, homeowners, and aviation, among others. By allowing participants to back insurance programs with capital and earn yields, Re aims to increase transparency and efficiency in the insurance sector.

The company was founded by Karn Saroya and Ben Aneesh in 2022. It recently announced a $7M funding round led by Electric Capital. Alongside the funding, Re has also launched a tokenized reinsurance fund on the Avalanche blockchain with a $15 million commitment from Nexus Mutual and the tokenized real-world asset (RWA) focused Vista fund of Ava Labs, an ecosystem developer organization for the Avalanche network.

Why this matters?👉 The global reinsurance market is valued at close to half a trillion dollars, with nearly trillions in premiums annually. While decentralized reinsurance marketplaces still have a long way to go in terms of user adoption, premiums from reinsurance contracts can offer DeFi investors stable and predictable yields, which Re aims to cater to and develop further. By initially offering a baseline for decentralized reinsurance marketplaces, Re could also pave the way for further innovation within insurance contracts built on-chain.

💸 Funding Rounds

Top 15 Rounds

Note: Polymarket’s Series A was closed in 2022. However, it was reported alongside its Series B announcement and thus included in this week’s data.

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All Rounds

UXLINK - Private Sale ($5.0M) | Web3 social infrastructure featuring social protocols and series of social networking DApps: https://www.uxlink.io/

Zest Protocol - Seed ($3.5M) | On-chain lending protocol, built for Bitcoin: https://www.zestprotocol.com/

ChainML (aka. Theoriq) - Seed+ ($6.2M) | Web3 enabled AI firm and developer of Theoriq a modular and composable AI Agent base layer: https://www.chainml.net/

Baby Shark Universe - Seed (Not Disclosed) | Gaming platform and metaverse centered around the Baby Shark official IP: https://babysharkuniverse.io/

Sekuya - Seed ($1.6M) | Anime game metaverse that incubated by SingularityDAO, Powered by Immutable: https://sekuya.io/

Zeta Markets - Private Sale ($5.0M) | Decentralized exchange for trading crypto perpetuals built on Solana: https://www.zeta.markets/

Polymarket (aka. Adventure One QSS) - Series A ($25.0M) | Real-time predictions market built using blockchain technology: https://polymarket.com/

Polymarket (aka. Adventure One QSS) - Series B ($45.0M) | Real-time predictions market built using blockchain technology: https://polymarket.com/

Re - Seed+ ($7.0M) | Protocol and platform providing a global transaction layer for insurable risks and enabling a decentralized reinsurance marketplace: https://re.xyz/

Anomaly - Seed ($1.5M) | AI-Powered Layer 3 for Gaming powered by Arbitrum Orbit, built using Gelato’s Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS): https://www.theanomaly.xyz/

Hylé - Seed ($2.6M) | Minimal Layer 1 network focussed only on verifying zero knowledge proofs: https://www.hyle.eu/

Gamic - Seed ($1.8M) | Decentralized messaging platform and social platform for communities engaging with Web3 products and services: https://gamic.app/

SPARK - Seed ($1.5M) | DeFi platform built on the Fuel network offering high performance order book, perpetual contracts, lending, and borrowing: https://sprk.fi/

Chainalysis - Secondary (Not Disclosed) | Blockchain data and analytics platform used for investigations and intelligence: https://www.chainalysis.com/

FIreblocks - Secondary (Not Disclosed) | Enterprise-grade platform for storing, transferring, and issuing digital assets enabled by MPC-based wallet infrastructure: https://www.fireblocks.com/

Cross The Ages - Strategic ($3.5M) | Mobile-first Web3 card game set in a dystopian clash of worlds: https://www.crosstheages.com/

Raven - Seed ($2.7M) | Proprietary high-frequency algorithmic trading firm and market maker specializing in CeFi market making and DeFi liquidity: https://www.ravendao.net/

Humanity Protocol - Private Sale ($30.0M) | Sybil-resistance network of blockchains providing developers with unique-human authentication mechanisms, and users complete ownership over data and identity: https://cfh.xyz/

Pencils Protocol (aka. PenPad) - Strategic (Not Disclosed) | Launch platform for fair-launch projects built on Scroll: https://penpad.io/

STON.fi - Private Sale (Not Disclosed) | Decentralized exchange and automated market maker (AMM) built on the TON blockchain: https://ston.fi/

Intensity Labs (aka. Shogun) - Seed ($6.9M) | Developer of Shogun, a liquidity routing protocol that combines intent-centric fulfillment with on-chain routing: https://twitter.com/shogunfi

Chainstack - Seed ($6.0M) | Web3 infrastructure-as-a-service provider offering managed node support and blockchain data API's: https://chainstack.com/

Param Labs - Seed ($7.0M) | Game developer specializing in multiplayer blockchain games including Kiraverse and Pixel to Poly: https://paramlabs.io/

Marginal - Seed (Not Disclosed) | Permissionless spot and perpetual exchange that enables leverage on any asset with an Uniswap V3 Oracle: https://marginal.network/

peaq - Public Sale ($20.0M) | Multi-chain layer one blockchain purposely built and optimized for Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN): https://www.peaq.network/

FantaGoal - Seed ($3.0M) | Web3 fantasy football ecosystem and community: https://fantagoal.io/

Focus Tree - Seed ($2.0M) | Web3 productivity app that rewards users for putting down their phones: https://www.focustree.app/

New Funds

No new funds this week.

🐕 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.