The Venture Capitalists January Funding Overview
Crypto investments have been down significantly in the last month due to uncertainty about the overall macroeconomic health. In January, there was an increase in the total number of investments made compared with the previous month, but the amount continues to trend down.
In January, there were 74 public crypto investments made by Venture Capitalists (VSs). The total of investments went up from the 50 made in December 2022, an increase of 48% month over month. But due to the overall market conditions, VCs’ investments are still down yearly; accordingly, Messari in January last year, VCs invested in 166 projects, a 55% decrease.
Solely infrastructure projects received around 30% of the total number of investments made by VCs to the various segments of the cryptocurrency market in January. About 4%, 14%, and 11% were accounted for by CeFi, DeFi, and NFT/GameFi.
The overall funding in January was $570 million, a decrease of 90.4% from the previous year and 13.7% of the prior month, with $660 million in total invested in December 2022. Counting only rounds of more than $10 million, excluding CEFIs, miners, and other centralised institutions, the amount of investment decreased for four months in a row to the lowest level in over two years.
The most significant investments made by total amount by Venture Capitalists were:
Plai Labs
The web3 social platform builder Plai Labs raised $32 million in a seed funding round co-led by cryptocurrency investment company a16z.
The cash will be used by Plai Labs, run by several former executives from the legacy social network Myspace and the game studio Jam City, to expand its staff and hire programmers to create decentralised social platforms that combine Web3 and artificial intelligence.
Plai Labs believe that the metaverse is a lonely world without social connection. So, they’re building a protocol that they predict will radically change how people communicate with one another.
=Nil (Not Yuga, there is a mistype on the picture above from Messari)
The =nil; Foundation, an Ethereum research and development company, has raised $22 million to develop its Proof Marketplace, which will enable crypto protocols to contract out the creation of zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs.
The fundraising round, headed by Polychain Capital, valued Foundation, which began in 2018 as a research group but has now evolved into a more conventional startup, at $220 million, according to a statement from the company.
Layer 1 and 2 blockchains and protocols can generate zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs on demand for seamless data-sharing without relying on centralised intermediaries, thanks to Proof Market, a platform for trustless data accessibility.
Ulvetanna
A $15 million seed round was closed by Ulvetanna, a zero-knowledge-proof (ZKP) hardware company, with participation from Paradigm and Bain Capital Crypto. According to Jump Crypto and Ulvetanna co-founder and CEO Radisav Cojbasic, the investment valued the firm at $55 million.
The company, under the direction of Cojbasic, is developing technology that aims to speed up the generation of ZKPs, a cryptographic method of authentication to prove particular information without disclosing the content of said information. This technology was previously applied to scaling issues for blockchain networks, especially Ethereum.
Parfin
Parfin, a supplier of secure web3 infrastructure for digital asset custody, trading, tokenisation, and management with headquarters in So Paulo, Brazil, raised $15 million in seed funding.
L4 Venture Builder, Valor Capital Group, and Alexia Ventures joined Framework Ventures in leading the round.
With an emphasis on privacy, portability, and interoperability, the business plans to use the cash to introduce new technologies. One is Parchain, a next-generation EVM permissioned blockchain network that will enable DeFi and asset tokenisation for regulated entities.
The Easy Company
The Easy Company, a social wallet provider situated in San Francisco, California, raised $14.2 million in seed money.
Lobby Capital, Relay Ventures, 6th Man Ventures, Tapestry VC, Upside Partnership, and Scribble Ventures took the lead in the funding round.
The business will use the money to increase operations and accelerate expansion.
Obol Technologies
Obol Labs announced the closing of a $12.5 million Series A fundraising round. BlockTower, Nascent, Placeholder, Spartan, and IEX participated for the first time, and Coinbase Ventures and Ethereal Ventures made follow-up investments. Pantera Capital and Archetype also co-led the round.
Obol Labs is the best-capitalised software team working on building Distributed Validator Technology to decentralise and secure blockchain staking, with total funding of $19M as of this most recent round.
The team behind Obol Labs is directly addressing the problem of single points of failure in staking infrastructure as the leading developer of Distributed Validator Technology (DVT).
Intella X
In addition to famous partners, including Polygon, Animoca Brands, Magic Eden, Planetarium, Big Brain Holdings, Crit Ventures, JoyCity, Pearl Abyss, XL Games, WEMIX, and Global Coin Research, the investment round comprised more than 20 investors from a variety of industries.
Intella X, the next-generation Web3 gaming platform, aims to close the gap between Web2 and Web3 by using special platform protocols, services, and games.
The platform continually pays the ecosystem’s contributors (game creators and consumers) with its native platform token, the Intella X token, through its own special “proof of contribution” protocol. This is how Intella X wants to differentiate itself from its rivals.
~ By Jordano M. Z. ~
