Profit Pulse: Crypto Chemistry

This week’s highlight covers Polymer Labs’ $23M Series A round, which the company will use to expand their IBC-based Layer 2 across the Ethereum rollup landscape.

In reviewing the deal, we were impressed by the team’s ambitious vision, blue-chip investor participation, and noteworthy team experience.

Table of Contents

• Profit Pulse: Crypto

  • Deal of the Week: Polymer Labs

  • Weekly Deal Flow Takeaways

    • Private Fundraises

    • Public/Fund Financings

Deal of the Week: Polymer Labs

• Polymer Labs’ $23M Series A

  • Founded: 2021

  • Team Size: <50

  • Location: Los Angeles, CA

  • Chains: Ethereum Layer-2’s

Problem: Ethereum rollup interoperability is sub-optimal because 1) the transport layer is non-standardized and 2) achieving interoperability requires rollups to use 1:1 connections, the growth of which scales slowly.

Solution: Polymer uses IBC to standardize the transport layer to enable faster, scalable growth.

Core Differentiation: From the Polymer Labs blog: “The Polymer rollup serves as an IBC hub and multi-hop router that makes the entire Ethereum rollup ecosystem look like a tightly coupled mesh network of execution environments, data availability layers, oracle providers, and so forth. Any two Ethereum rollups can establish secure IBC connections by connecting to Polymer, greatly reducing total costs of interoperability. Each IBC connection can also have different security properties.“

Key details include:

• Blue-chip investors: The round was led by Blockchain Capital, Maven 11 and Distributed Global and included participation from Coinbase Ventures, Placeholder, and Digital Currency Group

• Notable integrations: Polymer combines OP Stack’s settlement capabilities, Cosmos SDK’s interoperability, and EigenDA’s data availability solution. The team is also working with Celestia.

• Battle-tested team: The team boasts experience from Google, Citadel, McKinsey, Coinbase, Amazon, Verizon, Twilio, EY, and Uber.

Weekly Deal Flow Takeaways

Fundraises: 15 deals; $221.3M identified
Public / Funds: 2 deals; $50M identified in one financing deal

Private Fundraises

Flowdesk, a liquidity provider for Grayscale's Bitcoin ETF, raised $50M in a Series B round led by Cathay Innovation and included contributions from Cathay Ledger Fund, Ripple, Eurazeo, ISAI, Speedinvest and BPI.

Sygnum, a crypto bank, raised $40M in a round led by Milan-based asset manager Azimut Holding.

Polymer Labs, an Ethereum interoperability hub, raised $23M in a round led by Blockchain Capital, Maven 11 and Distributed Global. The round included participation from Coinbase Ventures, Placeholder and Digital Currency Group

Axiom, a smart contract infrastructure startup, raised $20M in a round led by Paradigm and Standard Crypto, with participation from Robert Ventures and Ethereal Ventures.

Tune.FM, a Hedera-based Web3 music service, raised $20M from LDA Capital.

Kiln, an Ethereum staking platform, raised $17M in a round led by 1kx, with participation from IOSG, Crypto.com, Wintermute Ventures, KXVC and LBank

Finoa, a German crypto custodian and staking service provider focused on institutional clients, raised $15M in a round co-led by Maven 11 and Balderton. Other investors in the round included Blue Bay Ventures, Signature Ventures, Coparion, and Venture Stars

Root Protocol, a digital identity service, raised $10M in a round led by Animoca Brands. The round had participation from Signum Capital, Ankr Network, CMS Holdings and angel investors Tekin Salimi and Meltem Demirors.

Woo, operator of the WOO X crypto exchange, raised $9M in a round led by crypto market maker Wintermute, with participation from Selini Capital, Time Research, Presto Labs, Pulsar, AlphaLab Capital, Efficient Frontier, Amber and Riverside Hedge.

Pontem, a web3 product development studio, raised $6M with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Aptos Foundation, Wintermute, Altonomy, Shima Capital, and Kraken Ventures.

Arcade2Earn, a play-to-earn gaming platform that recently moved away from Solana to Ethereum and Avalanche, raised $4.8M with participation from Crypto.com Capital. Other investors included Solana Ventures, Shima Capital, KuCoin Labs, and GSR

Eesee, a Dubai-based NFT marketplace gamification startup, raised $2.9M with participation from SevenX Ventures, Maven Capital, MetaBros, Contango Digital Assets, and BasementDAO.

Umoja, an Atlanta-based DeFi startup, raised $2M with participation from Quantstamp, Blockchain Founders Fund, Orange DAO, Hyperithm, Psalion, and Avalanche.

imgnAI, a Crypto-native AI platform, raised a $1.6M seed round led by Hack VC. Rana Capital, Selini Capital, West Ham Capital, Motus Capital and dao5 also participated in the round.

BitGo, a crypto custodian company, raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Brink's, a legacy cash management company.

Beacon, a web3 accelerator introducing ten new startups in its third cohort.

Public/Fund Financings

Circle, the USDC stablecoin issuer, filed confidential IPO papers. Over the years, the company has raised more than $1B with participation from General Catalyst, Goldman Sachs, IDG Capital, BlackRock, Fidelity, Marshall Wace, Bitmain, DCG, and Fin Capital.

Canaan, a crypto mining rig manufacturer, raised $50M through preferred share financing.

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