🍋 FRESH FUNDING 🍋
Babel Finance, Crypto Services: $40M. The Series A investment round for the crypto financial services provider was led by Zoo Capital, Sequoia Capital China, Dragonfly Capital, BAI Capital, and Tiger Global Management.
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- Babel plans to use the latest in fresh funding to further support institutional investments.
- The startup claims to have over 500 institutional clients already, with a derivatives portfolio generating $8B in monthly trading volume.
- Institutional investors collectively hold over $64B in crypto AUM, with most AUM concentrated in BTC and ETH.
DappRadar, Crypto Data/Analytics: $5M. The Series A funding round was led by Prosus Ventures, Blockchain.com Ventures, and NordicNinja VC.
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- DappRadar is an international app store for DeFi and NFT platforms, providing data on over 5K Dapps on 20 blockchains.
- The startup plans to use its Series A funding to launch new products and increase brand awareness.
- Q1 saw a decrease in funding for crypto data and analytics startups, despite a $15M funding round from Coin Metrics and a $100M funding round for Chainalysis.
ParaSwap, DeFi/DEX: $3M. The ETH-based DEX aggregator raised funds in a seed extension round led by Blockchain Capital, White Star Capital, and DeFi Alliance.
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- Other participants included Andre Cronje (founder, Yearn Finance), Michael Egorov (founder, Curve Finance), and Fredrick Haga (founder, Dune Analytics).
- With the latest fresh funding, ParaSwap is looking to expand support for other blockchains like Avalanche, Arbitrum, and Fantom, as well as Ethereum Layer-2 networks like ZkSync and Optimism.
- ParaSwap has received total funding of $5.7M. The startup previously received $2.7M in a seed round back in September.
Solana, Blockchain: $100M. The strategic funding round for the Solana blockchain was supported by Huobi, Gate Labs, NGC Ventures, HashKey, and MATH Global Foundation.
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- With the fresh funding, Solana plans to accelerate projects for the Asian market by creating several funds to pay for various projects within the Solana ecosystem.
- Gate Lab’s fund will focus on furthering brand recognition initiatives in the Asia-Pacific area. Huobi’s fund will promote the development of infrastructure products on the Solana blockchain.
- NGC Venture will provide business growth, recruiting, and financial management mentorships for Solana-based startups. MATH Global Foundation’s fund is focused on global investments and the building of more accessible DeFi tools.
Xcad Network, DeFi: $3.9M. The private funding round was led by VC firm Zilliqa, with participation from LD Capital, Genesis Block Ventures, and AU21.
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- Xcad is currently developing a “DeFi plugin for Youtube,” which lets YouTubers “tokenize themselves and earn rewards from their content” while also rewarding viewers for engaging with content.
- Xcad’s Youtuber token system wants to create an alternative revenue stream for content creators by allowing the tokens to be used in NFT sales, providing a voting system for future content, staking functionalities, and a system for converting tokens into fiat currencies.
- The startup’s ecosystem already has over 80K users with a combined audience of over 40M followers.
