WEB3 AND BLOCKCHAIN PROJECTS RAISED OVER $642 MLN IN FEBRUARY

• In February, blockchain-oriented projects raised more than $642 million in funding.
• The focus of the funds was mainly on the DeFi and blockchain infrastructure development sectors.

In February 2024, 114 Web3 and blockchain projects raised a total of $642.1 million in funding. Incrypted’s editorial team broke down this month’s investments in detail.

EigenLayer, a restacking protocol, raised the most funds in February. The funding was provided by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. EigenLayer founder Sriram Kannan declined to disclose the protocol’s valuation after receiving new capital.

Next in terms of funding received are:

• $35 million – Flare. L1-net raised the investment in a private funding round that included participation from Kenetic, Aves Lair and others. Flare supports protocol creation and focuses on pricing oracles, passing asset prices between different dApps.
  
• $27 million – Avail. The startup reported the completion of a seed round led by Founders Fund and Dragonfly Capital. SevenX Ventures, Figment Capital, and Nomad Capital also provided funds. Several business angels participated in the round, including Ethereum developer Tim Beyko and investor Balaji Srinivasan. The funds will be used to develop the company’s three products.
  
• $25 million – MetaStreet. The project raised funds and announced the launch of a game called ASCEND. The team stated that the new game will “unlock the largest untapped source of profitability in cryptocurrency – NFT.” The funding round was participated in by gmoney and 5 other private investors. They plan to use the funds to develop a product that will create capital markets for illiquid assets.
  
• $25 million – Oobit. The mobile payment app raised funds in a Series A funding round led by the investment arm of Tether, the issuer of the USDT stablecoin. In addition, the project received funding from Titan Fund CMCC Global and 468 Capital, as well as Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.
  
• $23 million – Ether.Fi. The EigenLayer-based restacking protocol raised investment as part of a Series A funding round co-led by Bullish Capital and CoinFund with participation from OKX Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Consensys and Amber. The fundraising comes amid rapid growth in the aggregate value of blockchain funds on the protocol. Since the beginning of the year, this indicator has grown almost 16 times.

Undisclosed details

A number of projects reported raising funding during February, but did not disclose the amount of investment.

Dispread, KIP Protocol, MON Protocol, Bitlight Labs, Allora, Bitmap Tech, Merlin Chain, Carry1st, Folks Finance, BiHelix, DeBox, LN Markets, Carbcoin, DexTools, Hydro Protocol, Shogun, NFPrompt, Tornado Blast, Jade98, Prom, Matr1x FIRE, Honeypot Finance, Renzo Protocol, XPLA, 5ire, Aerodrome, Delphinus Lab, Babylon, Cycle Network, Morpho, Humanity Protocol, Cetus Protocol, LinkTo, Integral, Imaginary Ones, Co Museum.

Artificial Intelligence

In February, AI-focused projects attracted more than a billion dollars worth of investment. Incrypted’s editorial team selected the top 5 projects that received the most funding.

• $1 billion – Moonshot AI. The Chinese startup received investments from Alibaba and VC HongShan. After the funding round, the company was valued at $2.5 billion. Moonshot AI is building machine learning models that can understand and generate text in human language. The startup launched Kimi Chat chatbot Kimi Chat in October 2023.
  
• $675 million – Figure. The company, which develops robots with artificial intelligence functions, has attracted investment at a valuation of $2.6 billion. The startup has received funding from Microsoft, OpenAI Startup Fund, NVIDIA, Parkway Venture Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures, and Jeff Bezos. It is known that the company will use the new capital for manufacturing, AI training, deploying more robots and expanding its engineering staff.
  
• $320 million – Lambda. The graphics processor firm raised the investment in a funding round led by US Innovative Technology with participation from B Capital, SK Telecom, T. Rowe Price Associates, Crescent Cove, and Mercato Partners. The company will use the new funding to expand its artificial intelligence business.
  
• $200 million – Glean. The developer of an enterprise AI search platform has raised $200 million at a valuation of $2.2 billion. Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Databricks Ventures, Workday Ventures and Capital One Ventures participated in the Series D funding round. The company provides a search platform with a dialog interface similar to ChatGPT. Enterprises use it to help their employees navigate internal data warehouses faster.
  
• $110 million – Sierra. The startup, which “hopes to leave a mark on the field of conversational artificial intelligence,” has raised investment from Sequoia Capital and Benchmark. Company representatives did not disclose the company’s valuation.

Dynamics:

Projects attracted the largest amount of investments in the amount of $241.5 million in the period from February 17 to February 24. EigenLayer was the leader in terms of the amount of funding received. The funds’ attention was focused on the DeFi and blockchain infrastructure development sectors.

Between February 1 and February 10, 2024, 34 projects received investments totaling $131.4 million. Oobit and Cube.Exchange attracted the most funds, and the funds’ attention was focused on the DeFi and blockchain infrastructure sectors.

From February 10 to 17, 18 projects attracted investments totaling $133.2 million. MetaStreet and Analog were the leaders in terms of the amount of funding received. The funds focused on the DeFi and blockchain infrastructure development sectors.

In addition, at the end of the month, from February 24 to 29, 33 projects received $135.9 million in investments.

During this period, Ether.Fi ($25 million) and Avail ($27 million), which we mentioned above, attracted funding. Among others, the following projects received funds:

• $17 million – Backpack. The ecosystem of companies, which includes cryptocurrency wallet Backpack, NFT collection Mad Lads and exchange Backpack, announced the completion of a strategic Series A investment round at a combined valuation of $120 million. The round was led by venture capital firm Placeholder VC. Also participating were major counterparties such as Hashed, Robot Ventures, Amber Group, Wintermute, Jump Crypto, Selini Capital, Delphi Digital and founders such as Solana, Tensor, Jito, Zeta, Marginfi, Drift, Monad and Galxe.
  
• $10 million – MXC. The startup has raised funding from JDI Venture to build an Ethereum-based DePIN. The company will use the funds to accelerate the development of the project’s infrastructure.
  
• $7.5 million – Initia. The Initia project announced plans to raise seed round funding to develop a Rolapa-centric blockchain. The funding round will be led by Delphi Ventures and Hack VC. Several business angels will also provide funds, notably Split Capital co-founder Zahir Ebtikar. The structure of the round and its timing were not specified in the release. The new capital will be used to develop a blockchain of the same name.
  
• $6 million – BounceBit. The Singapore-based bitcoin restacking infrastructure provider has raised investment. The seed round of funding was jointly led by Blockchain Capital and Breyer Capital with participation from dao5, CMS Holdings, Bankless Ventures, NGC Ventures, Matrixport Ventures, Primitive Ventures, OKX Ventures, Mirana Ventures, HTX Ventures, Mexc Ventures and others. The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and development efforts.
  
• $5.8 million – Validation Cloud. The Web3 company announced the completion of a funding round led by Cadenza Ventures with participation from Blockchain Founders Fund, Bloccelerate, Blockwall, Side Door Ventures, Metamatic, GS Futures, and AP Capital.
  
• $4.9 million – Silence Laboratories. A startup that builds infrastructure using multi-party computing has raised investment. The funding round was led by Pi Ventures with participation from Kira Studio and private investors. Silence Laboratories will use the funding to develop its product.
  
• $4 million – Ready Games Network. The company, which offers developers tools for embedding NFT, cryptocurrency wallets and other products into Web3 games, said it has received funding from Delphi Digital, NeoTokyo, Merit Circle, Momentum6, Purechain Capital, Alex Becker and Token Metrics Ventures. The new capital will be used to grow the business and hire more engineers to help grow the crypto-gaming economy.
  
• $4 million – Octav. The startup has received strategic investment from someone “with a high level of equity in cryptocurrency.” The company is looking to use some of the fresh capital to expand its marketing and sales team.
  
• $3 million – BitBrawl. The Solana blockchain-related project has raised investment for future token startup BRAWL. Morningstar Ventures Big Brain Holdings and Shima Capital provided funding for the startup.
  
• $3 million – Talus Network. The cryptocurrency startup completed its first round of funding. The project attracted investments from Polychain Capital, dao5, Hash3, TRGC, WAGMI Ventures and Inception Capital. The team also said that representatives from Nvidia, IBM, Blue7 and Symbolic Capital contributed to support the mission of sharing AI and blockchain.
  
• $2.8 million – ContributionDAO. Singapore-based provider of a steaking platform for institutional clients has raised investment in a seed round of funding led by KASIKORN X Venture Capital with participation from GuildFi, Axelar Network, KX, Agnostic Fund, Whale Ground and private investors. The company intends to use the funds for further development.
  
• $2.8 million – Sphere. The company announced the completion of a seed round of funding co-led by The Chernin Group and Jump Crypto with participation from Hudson River Trading, Republic Capital, Big Brain Holdings, Solana Ventures, SteelDAO, Stakeholder Ventures and private investors. The startup is in the business of enabling participants in underserved markets to access cross-border payments via stablecoins.
  
• $2.25 million – Arkis. The brokerage firm has closed a preliminary funding round led by Gumi Cryptos Capital with participation from G1 Ventures, Blocklabs, and Roosh Ventures. The firm’s goal is to accelerate the adoption of DeFi in large organizations.
  
• $1.9 million – BuildBear. The firm, which builds and automated and continuous testing system focused on Web3, has raised funding. Investors included Superscrypt, Tribe Capital, 1kx, Iterative, Plug-N-Play and others.
  
• $1.73 million – Open Asset. The South Korean tokenized asset issuance company received funds in an initial funding round. Investors included Hana Ventures, Korea Investment Partners and Mashup Ventures. Open Asset is developing a solution that will allow financial institutions to use blockchain and trade tokenized assets.
  
• $1.5 million – PlayMakers. The Web3 gaming company raised the funds in a pre-seed round of funding led by RockawayX with participation from private investors. Funds raised will be used to expand PlayMakers’ toolkit and grow the team.
  
• $1.4 million – Fair Math. The provider of an automated platform for providing fully homomorphic encryption has raised investment from Cryptos Capital, Inception Capital, and Polymorphic Capital. The company intends to use the funds to expand operations.
  
• $1.1 million – HackQuest. The educational Web3 platform announced that it has completed the funding of its previous seed round of funding. Investors included STEPN Find Satoshi Lab, HashKey Capital, ByteTrade Lab, Outlier Ventures, Hash Global, OnePiece Labs, and others. HackQuest has partnered on developer training with more than 10 blockchains, including Mantle, Solana and Arbitrum. The project team said it will use the funding to launch a more diverse training program and support more Web3 developers launching their own projects.
  
• $800,000 – Saturn. The platform announced the closing of a funding round led by Sora Ventures with participation from CMS Holdings, Cricket, Osprey Funds, Silvermine and private investors.
  
• $500,000 – PredX. An artificial intelligence-enabled prediction marketplace built on the SEI blockchain has attracted investment. The platform allows users to share opinions on current events and buy stocks. Penrose Tech and Malana Ventures participated in the seed round of funding.

Did not disclose the amount of investment:

The XPLA platform has received an investment from Tess Ventures. The team will use the funds to develop the blockchain ecosystem.

Hedge fund Gotbit has invested a “seven-figure” amount in EVM-enabled L1 blockchain 5ire.

OKX Ventures, the investment arm of OKX Exchange, has invested in startup Delphinus Lab, which aims to build an application aggregation platform based on Zero-Knowledge WebAssembly.

The startup at Integral, which is building accounting infrastructure for crypto startups, received funding from Franklin Templeton.

Binance Labs, the venture capital arm of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, has invested in the Babylon bitcoin steaking protocol.

Omnichain protocol Cycle Network received “millions of dollars” in a funding round led by Vertex Venture, with participation from Summer Ventures, LTP, Super Chain Capital, GSG Digital and others.

US-based fund Pantera Capital announced an investment in decentralized lending protocol Morpho.

Humanity Protocol, working on palm-based user identification technology, has received funding from more than 20 crypto funds including Hashed, CMCC, Cypher Capital, Foresight Ventures and Mechanism Capital among others.

Cetus Protocol, powered by Sui and Aptos, has attracted investment from Sui Foundation. The funds raised will be used to develop the project’s infrastructure.

Web3 company Imaginary Ones raised investments from Animoca Brands, MH Ventures, Cypher Capital, NxGen and private investors.

Animoca Brands has invested in startup GoMuseum.

Investors and Segments

According to CryptoRank, the most active investor in February was Foresight Ventures. The fund invested in 9 startups.

In February, investors focused on the DeFi and blockchain infrastructure development sectors.

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