Crypto Fundraising weekly
Dates: 21 – 27, Mar 2022

This week's biggest funding round

Yuga Labs raised $450M in a funding round from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z crypto), Animoca Brands, Coinbase Ventures, MoonPay, Tiger Global, The Sandbox, Google Ventures (GV), Standard Crypto, Samsung Next, Lightspeed, Hashed, Eden Block, Vayner Fund, Tess Ventures, SV Angel, Sound Ventures, Seven Seven Six Ventures, Thrive Capital, Artist Capital, LionTree, FTX Ventures, Mark Cuban.

Yuga Labs is an NFT and cryptocurrency marketing and development company. Yuga Labs is a web3 platform building what’s next, most known for the creation of the Bored Ape Yacht Club and its recent acquisition of CryptoPunks and Meebits.

Pre-seed and Seed investment rounds

Archway raised $21M in a Seed funding round from CoinFund*, Hashed*, 1confirmation, IDEO CoLab Ventures, Blockchain Capital, Wintermute, Figment, Chorus One, Stakefish, Lemniscap, Hypersphere, Cosmostation.

Archway is an incentivized smart contract chain built on the Cosmos network. It offers developers a platform to easily deploy high-performance decentralized applications (dapps) while capturing a proportional share of network fees, inflation, and premiums. By aligning the incentives of developers and their dapp communities, Archway aims to create an equitable blockchain system that allows developers to participate in the value they create for the protocols they build on.

Tea raised $8M in a Seed funding round from Binance Labs Fund, XBTO Humla Ventures, Lattice Fund, DARMA Capital, Coral DeFi, Woodstock, RockTree Capital, SVK Crypto.

An open-source software platform.

Bastion Protocol raised undisclosed amount in a Seed funding round from ParaFi Capital, Jane Street, Digital Currency Group (DCG), Crypto.com Capital, Coin Merge Strategy (CMS).

Bastion is a decentralized stableswap and lending protocol built on Aurora, NEAR's EVM-compatible layer.

SkateX raised $5M in a Seed funding round from Play Ventures, Cadenza, Animoca Brands, Coinbase Ventures, Solana Ventures.

NFT skateboarding project, powered by Solana.

Struct Finance raised $3.9M in a Seed funding round from Blizzard, Antler, Arcanum Capital, Avalanche, AVentures DAO, Bixin Ventures.

Decentralized blockchain-based platform for structured financial products.

Gensyn raised $6.5M in a Seed funding round from Eden Block*, Galaxy Digital, Maven 11 Capital, CoinFund, Hypersphere, Zee Prime Capital.

Gensyn Protocol is a layer-1 trustless protocol for deep learning computation that rewards participants for their compute time. It facilitates task distribution and payments through smart contracts, ensures the verification of completed ML work and creates a decentralized AI compute network.

Other investment rounds

Ultiverse raised $5M in a  funding round from Binance Labs Fund*.

Metaverse startup that is working on connecting blockchain applications with virtual worlds that use tokens to incentivize activities and community building within its ecosystem.

Joystream raised $5.9M in a  funding round from Digital Currency Group (DCG)*, Hypersphere*, Alliance DAO (ex DeFi Alliance), D1 Ventures, LD Capital, Genblock Capital, MEXC, BoostVC, Signum Capital, OKX Ventures (ex OKEx Blockdream Ventures), SkyVision Capital, Waterdrip Capital, GSR Markets LTD, Master Ventures, Kernel Ventures, Illusionist Group, Lotus Capital, Lancer Capital, Basics Capital, Gate Labs, Vestigium, Sneaky Ventures, LVT Capital, PNYX Ventures, Momentum 6 (M6).

Joystream is a decentralised video platform and blockchain, built on Polkadot.

Quai Network raised $8M in a  funding round from Polychain Capital.

Quai is a scalable, EVM compatible network of merge-mined blockchains enabling fast, accessible, and low-cost decentralized finance.

Worldcoin raised $100M in a  funding round from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z crypto)*, Khosla Ventures*.

WorldCoin are building what they call a Privacy-Preserving Proof-of-Personhood Protocol (PPPoPP). WorldCoin originally set out with the goal of airdropping a token to a billion people. Along the way, WorldCoin found that team had to develop a lot of foundational infrastructure not only on the hardware side (which became the Orb), but also on the crypto/protocol side.

Upshot raised $22M in a Series A  funding round from Polychain Capital, Framework Ventures, CoinFund, Blockchain Capital, Slow Ventures, Mechanism Capital, Delphi Digital.

Upshot is a blockchain-based protocol providing industry-leading non-fungible token (NFT) appraisals.

* fund, that lead investment round