Financing Weekly Selection for Week 29 of 2023: Binance Labs leads a $4 million seed round financing for Web3Go.
According to BlockBeats statistics, there were a total of 11 financing deals last week, which is a significant decrease compared to previous weeks. The total amount raised was approximately 51.136 million US dollars, with an average financing amount of 4.6487 million US dollars. The majority of the financing deals were in the digital asset management/payment sector, with relatively more deals in the infrastructure sector. There were fewer financing deals in the social/creator economy and metaverse/GameFi sectors, and no financing deals in the NFT/digital fashion, other, and DeFi sectors. The following chart shows the financing distribution across different sectors last week:
Metaverse/GameFi
In the field of Metaverse/GameFi, a total of 2 financings have been completed, with the total amount undisclosed.
GigaSpace
On July 7th, GigaSpace, a Hong Kong-based metaverse company, announced the completion of a new round of strategic financing. Find Satoshi Lab, the parent company of STEPN, and Web3 venture capital fund ProDigital Future Fund participated in the financing, and the specific amount has not been disclosed. This round of financing will be used to promote the development of STEPN City. Find Satoshi Lab will provide strategic guidance and resources to promote GigaSpace's growth and market share.
This round of financing is the foundation for the next round of strategic financing. GigaSpace's goal is to raise $3 million this year, and Prodigital Future Fund will lead the new round of strategic investment. GigaSpace will use this funding to accelerate business expansion.
According to official information, GigaSpace is a shared metaverse with social and gaming elements that brings together the web3 community to provide individuals with an active social environment for connection and interaction. By empowering the community to build in the metaverse, GigaSpace encourages community participation and promotes exploration of new use cases for NFTs and tokens. GigaSpace is creating a collaborative and expansive metaverse that unites all web3 communities in a single space. By providing robust infrastructure and utilities, it enables communities and projects to seamlessly integrate with their virtual world, saving time and resources while fostering innovation and exploration.
MEEET
On July 7th, according to official sources, MEEET, a blockchain gaming platform based on Social & AIGC, completed its seed round financing with a valuation of 30 million. In addition, the platform successfully launched the Arbitrum network and achieved dual-chain operation on BSC & ARB.
MEEET is a blockchain gaming platform based on Social & AIGC. The team has served over 10 million users and created a P2E social game with a daily active user count of up to 450,000 people. MEEET aims to help external game developers attract more web3 users by utilizing social networks and viral growth to attract both web3 users and traditional gamers, creating a highly scalable, highly engaging, and vibrant community.
Social/Creative Economy
There were a total of 1 financing in the social/creator economy sector, with a total amount exceeding 8 million US dollars, accounting for 15.64% of the total financing amount last week.
Bluesky
On July 6th, the "decentralized Twitter" project Bluesky announced the completion of an $8 million financing round, led by Neo, with participation from Joe Beda, co-founder of Kubernetes, Bob Young of Red Hat, Amjad Masad of Replit, Amir Shevat, Heather Meeker, and others.
Bluesky is a non-profit company whose mission is to "develop and promote the widespread adoption of open and decentralized public conversation technology." As a non-profit enterprise, our status allows us to pursue a mission that is higher than profit, but we still need to make Bluesky a sustainable service in order to establish a lasting open ecosystem. To achieve this, we have raised $8 million in seed funding to support our mission and growth, and are taking the first steps towards a service-oriented business model.
Last autumn, Bluesky began building its own client application to promote the adoption and development of the AT protocol. This summer, Bluesky transitioned from a limited liability company to a public benefit corporation to gain greater independence from past financing. Bluesky's mission and board of directors remain unchanged, but with this transition, funds were raised from a series of value-aligned investors who share Bluesky's vision for open and decentralized public conversation.
The new funds will be used to expand the team and enhance activities such as the decentralized AT protocol that supports the Bluesky application. At the same time, Bluesky has launched a paid service in partnership with domain registrar Namecheap, providing domain purchase and management services.
Infrastructure
In the infrastructure field, a total of 5 financings were completed with a total amount of over 12.586 million US dollars, accounting for 24.61% of the total financing amount last week.
Web3Go
On July 5th, blockchain startup Web3Go completed a $4 million seed round of financing. Binance Labs led the investment, with participation from HashKey Capital, NGC Ventures, Shima Capital, IVC, LIF, Big Brain Holdings, and Archerman Capital.
Web3Go is a data intelligence network under Binance Labs MVB V incubation program, providing a set of AI-native digital asset tools and real-time data infrastructure. The company is fundamentally changing the AI and data fields through its cutting-edge solutions, creating AI-native digital assets, and redefining production relationships through blockchain technology.
Web3Go has launched its Data Intelligence Network (DIN) service and opened registration on July 5th. The service is based on Crypto's AI-native digital asset ownership solution and relies on AI and big data infrastructure. It allows users to create various types of AI-native digital assets using on-chain and off-chain datasets, knowledge bases, and artificial intelligence. These digital assets include transaction information flows, trading strategies, trading assistant robots, as well as entertainment, education, and social types of intelligent assistants. At the same time, the network uses blockchain to confirm ownership of AI-native digital assets.
Aspecta
On July 6th, Aspecta, a digital identity ecosystem focused on developers and powered by AI, announced the completion of a new round of strategic financing. The specific amount of financing has not been disclosed, and this round of financing was participated by Spartan Group. Prior to this, Aspecta received a seed round investment of $350 million from globally renowned venture capital funds, including ZhenFund, HashKey Capital, Foresight Ventures, and SNZ Holding.
The new funds will be dedicated to improving Aspecta's core application, Aspecta ID, and expanding the developer ecosystem infrastructure globally. The team's goal is to establish a new paradigm of data ownership, interoperability, and user experience using artificial intelligence and blockchain technology. BlockBeats previously reported that on March 22, Aspecta announced the completion of a $3.5 million seed round of financing and the global public testing plan for its flagship product, Aspecta ID.
Ola
On July 4th, Ola, a Web3 startup company focused on privacy, completed a $3 million seed round of funding. Web3.com Ventures and Foresight Ventures jointly led the investment, with Token Metrics Ventures, LD Capital, CatcherVC, and others participating. Ola uses a hybrid zero-knowledge rollup called "ZK-ZKVM" to provide optional privacy for the cryptocurrency industry. Ola is currently not open to the public, and the company plans to launch a beta testnet in the third quarter and release a public testnet by the end of 2023.
It is reported that Ola's mission is to make privacy a fundamental right in the digital age by introducing programmable privacy, programmable scalability, and developer compatibility to Ethereum and other public blockchains, and to enable individuals to regain ownership of their digital lives. As a full-stack developer platform for ZK applications, Ola provides a variety of tools such as ZKVM, Ola-Lang, compilers, verifiers, delegators, as well as SDKs, resource managers, operating systems, IDEs, and UIs to meet different use cases with different levels of privacy needs.
Hello
On July 6th, Hello, a decentralized data storage startup, announced the completion of a €170,000 Pre-Seed round of financing. Esade BAN, Casti Ventures, Bcombinator, and several European angel investors participated in the funding, which will be used for product development and strategic execution.
It is reported that Hello Drive is an open-source, encrypted, user-controlled decentralized storage software designed for both web3 and traditional users. Data is securely stored in a decentralized infrastructure, including applications, networks, and infrastructure based on blockchain technology, decentralized storage, and distributed databases. Hello aims to provide a sustainable, scalable, efficient, and user-controlled data storage method to address the limitations of traditional systems.
The driving force behind the development of Hello is two talented young individuals. The CEO is 18-year-old lvaro Pintado Santaularia, who not only serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Hello, but is also the founder of AI SaaS company Whispr. Pintado's notable achievements include writing the book "Decentralized Financial Systems" at the age of 17, demonstrating his profound understanding of decentralized technology. Assisting him is 20-year-old Alexander Baikalov, who serves as Hello's Chief Technology Officer and brings valuable experience gained from developing and selling software programs as a freelancer since the age of 15.
Shardeum
On July 8th, Shardeum, a blockchain founded by Nischal Shetty, co-founder and CEO of WazirX, was valued at $248 million and raised $5.4 million in funding. The funding round was participated by Amber Group, Galxe, J17 Capital, TRGC, Jsquare, Bware Labs, Tan Labs, Hyperithm Group, and Luganodes. The funds raised in this round will be used to strengthen Shardeum's ecosystem and prepare for the launch of its mainnet in late 2023.
As previously reported by BlockBeats, Shardeum completed a $18.2 million seed round of funding in October 2022, with participation from Spartan Group, Big Brain Holdings, Jane Street, and Foresight Ventures.
Shardeum is a layer 1 blockchain that deploys efficient sharding technology to increase transactions per second (TPS) by adding more nodes. Nodes on Shardeum are assigned dynamic address ranges across multiple shards. As consensus occurs at the transaction level, the network preserves transaction parallelism and atomic processing, achieving linear scalability.
Shardeum is a linearly scalable smart contract platform based on EVM. It provides permanently low gas fees and maintains true decentralization and solid security through dynamic state sharding. Shardeum's leaderless Proof of Quorum (PoQ) consensus algorithm, Proof of Stake (PoS) with slashes, backup nodes, node rotation, and permissionless participation all contribute to improving network security.
Digital Asset Management/Payment
There were a total of 3 financing rounds in the digital asset management/payment industry, with a total amount of over 30.55 million US dollars, accounting for 59.74% of the total financing amount last week.
Bitkub
On July 3rd, regulatory documents showed that Bitkub, a cryptocurrency exchange platform headquartered in Thailand, has agreed to sell 9.22% of its shares to local game publisher Asphere Innovations for a price of $17.8 million. The funds raised from this round of financing will be used to expand its digital asset services in Thailand.
XTM
On July 3rd, according to official sources, XTM digital asset management platform officially received a $10 million equity financing from SkyDAO organization, with the first phase of $5 million already received and a post-investment valuation of $100 million.
Bequest Finance
On July 5th, Bequest Finance, a fintech company aimed at simplifying the transfer of digital assets in trusts and estates, completed a $2.75 million financing round, led by Nyca Partners and supported by Mark Cuban and other fintech companies.
Currently, the best option for cryptocurrency users is to leave their private keys for the recipient to access. This is risky because many successors may not be savvy enough to recover and distribute digital assets properly. Even if the assets are recovered and distributed correctly, a bigger issue is one of legal compliance. Bequest aims to allow the trust and estate industry to accommodate all digital assets. This market expansion could bring in billions of dollars in revenue for the industry annually, which plays a critical role in financial planning. Through bequests, estate planners can compliantly add any digital asset to a client's estate: from Bitcoin to email, to photos and video content.
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