Despite the ongoing downturn in the cryptocurrency market, venture capital investment remains strong, with $141.3 million invested in 20 different companies in a two-week period. Leading the charge is Morpho, which secured $50 million in a funding round led by Ribbit Capital. Other prominent investors in this round included Kraken Ventures, Brevan Howard, A16z Crypto, Pantera Capital and Coinbase Ventures.
According to data from cryptofundraising.info, an extended Series A round of $18 million was raised by Andrena, a U.S. internet service provider developing DAWN (Decentralized Autonomous Wireless Network), a decentralized broadband protocol. Dragonfly Capital led this round with participation from CMT Digital, Parfi, 6th Man Ventures, Castle Island Ventures and Wintermute Ventures.
Other notable fundraising efforts include Vessel, a DeFi initiative creating an order book trading platform driven by ZK, which raised $10 million. Cartridge, a Web3 startup, received $7.5 million, while Web3 AI game publisher Pentagon Games, which uses ZK-EVM technology, received $6 million. Pentagon Games was matched by another Web3 AI network, Deagentai, with $6 million in fundraising. Curio, a Web3 game creation business, raised $5.7 million.
Tonx, a superapp platform layer, raised $4 million, while 375ai, a startup specializing in decentralized edge data analytics, raised $5 million. In addition, $4 million was raised by the startup behind the Tokenized Liquid Note (ZTLN), Zoth. The layer two (L2) game ecosystem company Moonveil Entertainment raised $3.6 million, while Payman AI brought up the tally of the top 12 fundraisers with a $3 million raise.
Other projects that received funding include Quantlytica ($1.1 million); Lync ($1.5 million); Elmts ($2 million); Metadao and Nexio ($2.2 million each); Khalani Network and Pichi Finance ($2.5 million each); and Blockscout ($3 million). The large funding these initiatives have received indicates that investor confidence in Web3 and blockchain technology is still strong, even in the midst of the market collapse.
An earlier report by PitchBook revealed that crypto funding in the first quarter of 2024 reached $2.4 billion, marking a consecutive quarterly increase. This uptick was driven by anticipation of lower Fed rates and the launch of the first spot Bitcoin ETF in the United States, which rekindled investor interest. Funding was distributed across 518 deals, reflecting a 40.3% increase from the previous quarter, according to data from PitchBook. In contrast, venture capital fundraising hit a near-five-year decline during the same timeframe.
The enthusiasm for crypto startups has waned since its peak of more than $10 billion in early 2022, influenced by economic uncertainties and the collapse of key industry players.
This massive investment into crypto companies shows existing actors such as Bit Digital Inc. (NASDAQ: BTBT) that despite the glitches that have plagued the industry in the recent past, it is still on a growth trajectory and more investments are likely to pour into the sector.
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