AWeb3VC - Funding Round Up #75

🗓️ Week of: June 2-8, 2024

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

$224M+ was raised across 31 funding rounds in Web3. Another solid week of funding as broader crypto markets remain (fairly) stable. We continue to see more seed-stage projects successfully close Series A rounds in under 12 months (e.g., Avail, M^0, Mountain Protocol, Blueberry Protocol). While investor speculation and prospects of future tokens certainly play a major factor, many projects are experiencing reasonable user growth and protocols advancing beyond testnets. Unsurprisingly, base protocols (i.e., Layer 1 and 2) continue to lead as the top category attracting funding this week and throughout 2024.

Outside of venture, M&A within Web3 is also picking up with about a dozen deals announced in the past month. Most notably, Robinhood announced the acquisition of Bitstamp for $200M. For a good analysis, check out Architect Partner’s M&A Alert on the deal. Moreover, an increase in M&A helps to realign multiples and valuations and increases the prospects for exits that don’t rely on launching a speculative token.

🏆 Largest Funding Round

➡️ Avail announced $43M in Series A funding. The round was co-led by Dragonfly, Founders Fund, and Cyber Fund. Other investors participating in the round included SevenX Ventures, Figment Capital, Nomad Capital, Chapter One, Foresight Ventures, Mirana Ventures, KR1, Alliance, and Hashkey Capital. The Series A follows just three months after Avail’s announced $27M Seed round in February. In total, Avail has raised over $75M.

Avail is a modular blockchain infrastructure focusing on the unification of Web3. Its architecture is centered around the Avail Trinity, which includes three core components: Avail DA, Avail Nexus, and Avail Fusion (Security).

Its first component, Avail DA, is a highly optimized base layer protocol, specifically constructed for data availability. Avail Nexus is a proof aggregation and sequencer for zero-knowledge rollups on top of Avail DA, allowing for cross-rollup and cross-ecosystem communication and settlement within the Avail ecosystem. Finally, Avail Fusion Security enables a basket of tokens (e.g., BTC, ETH, and others) to pool their crypto-economic security to contribute to the Avail consensus and secure the Avail network.

Why this matters?👉 As Layer 2 blockchains and rollups become prevalent, modular data availability solutions will play a key role in the future Web3 technical stack. Avail is building the infrastructure to support this rollup-centric future and position itself as the ideal base layer for rollups. Additionally, the project benefits from being founded by former founding team members of Polygon and backed by some of the top VCs in the industry.

💸 Funding Rounds

Top 15 Rounds

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All Rounds

Zizle - Seed ($3.0M) | Decentralized social network for communities built on Solana: https://www.zizle.com/

Milady - Private Sale ($5.0M) | Memecoin and community of the Milady NFT collection: https://milady.gg/

Hypersonic Laboratories - Series A ($7.0M) | Game studio and developer of HELIX, a metaverse and multiplayer role-playing sandbox platform for user-generated content (UGC): https://www.hypersoniclaboratories.com/

Everclear (fka. Connext) - Private Sale ($5.0M) | Cross-chain interoperability and communication protocol aiming to build the “HTTP of Web3”: https://www.connext.network/

Sidus Heroes - Strategic (Not Disclosed) | Web3 gaming metaverse multi-genre adventure game: https://sidusheroes.com/

Starpower - Seed (Not Disclosed) | Layer 2 network serving as a decentralized energy network of energy devices: https://www.starpower.world/

Avail - Series A ($43.0M) | Modular blockchain providing a base data availability layer, a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof-based coordination rollup, unified economic security layer: https://www.availproject.org/

Composable Corp (aka. Blueberry Protocol) - Series A ($2.5M) | Developer of the Blueberry Protocol, a decentralized lending and borrowing platform: https://www.blueberry.garden/

Stashh Labs - Seed ($3.3M) | Omnichain, social-first hub, and marketplace for NFT creators and collectors: https://stashh.io/

Ark Labs - Grant (Not Disclosed) | Layer 2 network built on Bitcoin designed for payments: https://arklabs.to/

Fhenix - Series A ($15.0M) | Blockchain powered by fully homomorphic encryption to bring Computation Over Encrypted Data to EVM based smart contracts: https://www.fhenix.io/

Cookie3 - Private Sale ($5.5M) | Web3 marketing protocol and AI data layer: https://www.cookie3.com/

XREX - Strategic ($18.8M) | Blockchain-enabled financial institution offering cryptocurrency exchange, payments, and asset management: https://xrex.io/

Mezzofy - Seed+ ($2.0M) | Global digital coupon platform for merchants: https://www.mezzofy.com/

GoPlus Security - Private Sale ($10.0M) | Decentralized user security network providing developer security API's, token risk classification, personal security products, and smart contract analysis tools: https://gopluslabs.io/

Mythical Games - Strategic (Not Disclosed) | Next-generation game technology studio at the intersection of blockchain and games: https://mythicalgames.com/

M^0 (aka. M^Zero) - Series A ($35.0M) | Decentralized network enabling institutional participants to reliably link assets to a decentralized infrastructure layer: https://m0.xyz/

Nubit (aka. Riema Labs) - Seed ($8.0M) | Bitcoin-native data availability layer: https://nubit.org/

Halo Social (fka. KuCoin Wallet) - Seed ($3.0M) | Web3 social app that enables users to monetize their social data through AI, decentralized identity, and a wallet aggregator: https://halo.social/

Almanax - Seed (Not Disclosed) | Developer of AI-powered security tools for Web3: https://www.almanax.ai/

The Sandbox (aka. Bacasable Global) - Convertible Note ($20.0M) | Decentralized, community-driven metaverse and gaming ecosystem: https://www.sandbox.game

Xociety - Seed+ ($7.5M) | Gaming metaverse featuring a third-person shooter and MMORPG hybrid gameplay developed by NDUS: https://xociety.io/

K3 Labs - Seed (Not Disclosed) | Web3 development platform combining kubernetes and template-driven web-services for business workflows and applications that utilize the power of decentralized compute, storage, and execution: https://www.k3-labs.com/

Mountain Protocol - Series A ($8.0M) | Developer of USDM, a permissionless yield-bearing stablecoin: https://mountainprotocol.com/

Glacier Network - Seed ($8.0M) | Programmable, modular and scalable blockchain infrastructure for storing, indexing and querying data tailored for AI and DePIN: https://www.glacier.io/

Ouinex - Public Sale ($1.0M) | Digital assets exchange and trading platform: https://ouinex.com/

COREx Network - Strategic (Not Disclosed) | Decentralized exchange built for the Core DAO ecosystem: https://corex.network/

Subsquid - Grant (Not Disclosed) | Peer-to-peer network and indexing toolkit to batch query and aggregate terabytes of on-chain and off-chain data: https://subsquid.io/

Crypto Blockchain Industries - Strategic ($13.5M) | Blockchain-based investment firm and operator of AlphaVerse, a digital metaverse hub, gaming, and interactive entertainment platform: https://www.cbicorp.io/

Datalayer - Seed ($0.5M) | Layer 1 blockchain enabled by localchains, lightweight user-owned chains running in parallel on users' desktops, wallets, browser extensions, or mobile devices: https://datalayer.co/

Folks Finance - Strategic (Not Disclosed) | DeFi protocol for lending, borrowing, and trading built on Algorand: https://folks.finance/

New Funds

Bain Capital Crypto - Fund II (Not Disclosed)

🙌 Cool Resources

LiquiFi, How to Launch a Token: Post-Launch resource guide

🐕 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.