Profit Pulse: Crypto Chemistry

This week’s highlight covers Initia’s $7.5M seed round, which the company will use for further developing its Celestia rollup-focused ecosystem.

Table of Contents

• Profit Pulse: Crypto

  • Deal of the Week: Initia’s $7.5M Seed Round

  • Weekly Deal Flow Takeaways

    • Private Fundraises

    • Mergers & Acquisitions

Deal of the Week: Initia’s $7.5M Seed Round

• Initia’s $7.5M Seed Round

  • Founded: 2022

  • Team Size: 20+

  • Location: Singapore

  • Chains: Multichain

Problem: Existing modular chains and rollups are still incomplete products without application-tailored architecture that abstracts away the disjointed pieces of the underlying infrastructure.

Solution: Initia is designed to create universal consistency and address the existing obstacles of modular systems with the help of Celestia.

Core Differentiation: From the team’s Medium: With Celestia’s DAS and NMT solutions, Initia is able to scale thousands of interwoven applications.

• With a shared DA Layer, the Initia L1 validator set, challengers, and instant bridge operators within the Initia system have access to state data to construct fraud proofs to dispute invalid rollup operations.

• Minitias can directly post transaction data to Celestia, which actors use to deterministically derive the rollup chain’s state and verify correctness of state transitions.

• Initia’s L1 validator set employs Omnitia Shared Security, a system that natively-integrates Celestia light nodes within the validator nodes to verify data across every Minitia without needing to download entire blocks.

• Furthermore, relevant actors can utilize Celestia’s NMT design to only download appropriate transactions. OSS allows Initia to scale without bloating the state of its L1 validator set or requiring them to run full nodes of every Minitia.

Weekly Deal Flow Takeaways

Fundraises: 5 deals; $79M identified
Mergers & Acquisitions: 2 deals; no financial terms disclosed.

Private Fundraises

Avail, an Ethereum-based data availability network, raised $27M in a seed funding round to develop its core products. The round was led by Founders Fund and Dragonfly, with participation from SevenX Ventures, Nomad Capital, and Figment. Several prominent angel investors participated, including Balajis, and Sunny from Osmosis.

Ether.fi, an Ethereum liquid restaking token, raised $23M in a round led by Bullish Capital and CoinFund, with participation from OKX Ventures, Foresight Ventures, and Consensys.

Backpack, a crypto exchange founded by former FTX and Alameda employees, raised $17M in a round led by Placeholder VC with participation from Hashed, Robot Ventures, Amber Grouop, Wintermute, and Selini.

Initia, a blockchain platform focused on supporting interoperability between multiple layer 2 networks, raised $7.5M in a seed round led by Delphi Ventures and HackVC with participation from Nascent, Figment, Big Brain, and A.Capital.

Karma3 Labs, a decentralized reputation protocol, raised $4.5M in a round led by Galaxy and IDEO CoLab Ventures. Additional investors included Spartan, SevenX, HashKey, Flybridge, Delta Fund, Draper Dragon and Compa Capital.

Mergers & Acquisitions

Ottr, a Solana-based wallet, was acquired by the main developer of Worldcoin, Tools for Humanity. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Winter, Y Combinator-backed NFT payment infrastructure startup, was acquired by Crossmint. Financial terms were not disclosed.

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