Funding Frontier: Dragonfly
01/12/2023-02/21/2023
Dragonfly is a leading venture capital firm in the crypto and blockchain space. Founded in 2018 by crypto-natives with over 10 years of investing and building experience, Dragonfly brings extensive access and influence to help crypto teams with global aspirations find innovation and adoption anywhere. With a total of $950M raised across 4 funds1, including their latest Dragonfly Fund III, which raised $650M in April 2022, Dragonfly has made 113 investments, with lead investments in 44 of them. This week, Funding Frontier is highlighting the latest funding deals by Dragonfly.
Kaito
Kaito has raised $5.3 million in seed round led by Dragonfly Capital with participation from Sequoia Capital, Jane Street, Mirana Ventures, Folius Ventures, and Alpha Lab Capital on February 21st, 2023. Kaito, founded by ex-Citadel manager Yu Hu, is an AI-powered search engine for the crypto industry that aims to solve the problem of information overload in the crypto industry by aggregating information from various platforms, including Twitter, Discord, governance forums, and research. Kaito also leverages AI for optimizing its search engine and will be integrating ChatGPT/GPT-3 to provide an additional search experience for users. The startup plans to launch a retail investor-focused search engine in Q2 2023, and eventually roll out a token-based community that will leverage a similar model to Wikipedia.
Renegade
Renegade has raised $3.4 million in seed round led by Dragonfly, Naval Ravikant, with participation from Balaji Srinivasan, Tarun Chitra, Lev Livnev, Marc Bhargave, and Lily Liu on February 20th, 2023. Renegade is a new decentralized exchange that provides users with universal trade privacy. Unlike current DEXes that are transparent and expose user balances and trade history, Renegade ensures complete trade privacy before and after a trade is filled, obscuring user activity from third-parties. Renegade solves many problems in current DeFi spot markets and offers better prices and optimal execution, making it beneficial for market makers, OTC takers, AMM takers, and privacy-conscious crypto-natives. Trades on Renegade are anonymous crosses, but it also implements Indications of Interest for full price discovery and better liquidity provision.
Monad Labs
Monad Labs has raised $19 million in seed round led by Dragonfly Capital with participation from other investors on February 14th, 2023. Monad Labs is a blockchain startup that has raised $19 million in seed funding to build a new layer-1 blockchain called Monad. Monad aims to fundamentally optimize the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to enable 10,000 transactions per second and 1 billion transactions per day, while preserving support for existing Ethereum smart contracts and infrastructure. The team's background in high-frequency trading and kernel development has given them a unique edge in developing these improvements. Monad's mission is to help decentralization scale by helping EVM scale, enabling developers to stand on the shoulders of giants and rapidly innovate while reducing friction for users and preserving support for all the work that's already been done in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Caldera
Caldera (previously Constellation) has raised $9 million across 2 rounds led by Dragonfly and Sequoia with participation from Neo, 1kx, Ethereal Ventures, and others on February 13th, 2023. Caldera provides a solution to slow transactions and high fees in Web3 by enabling anyone to launch and run dedicated, performant layer-two blockchain "rollups". Caldera's app-rollups grant each application its own dedicated lane for transactions, lowering transaction costs, de-risking from fee spikes and network outages, and empowering developers to create customizable fee structures, generate revenue via transaction and bridge fees, and add support for other programming languages. Caldera's solution enables thousands of projects to launch dedicated blockchains for their ecosystems, powering the future of Web3.
Alkimiya
Alkimiya has raised $7.2 million in venture round led by 1kx, Castle Island Ventures with participation from Dragonfly and other investors on January 12th, 2023. Alkimiya is a permissionless, open-source protocol for consensus capital markets that allows consensus producers, such as PoW miners and staking validators, to create financial contracts backed by the underlying consensus resources to lock-in returns upfront. Alkimiya v1.0 focuses on the financial abstractions of proof-of-work and offers two core products: Silica and Hash Vaults. Silica represents a swap between the upfront payment that the buyer agrees to purchase the contract with and the mining rewards produced by the amount of hashpower specified during the contract period, while Hash Vaults are pools of Silica that contain additional payout logic and can be restructured into other forms of yield generating assets secured by underlying hashpower.
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/dragonfly-capital-partners-eed4/recent_investments