Funding Wrap: A Quiet Q3 for Crypto VC Investment

Crypto venture capital funding dropped in the third quarter.

Only $5.5 billion was invested in crypto startups from July through September, according to a new Galaxy report — marking the lowest quarter for investments this year. 

The figure is still higher than the seven-year quarterly average of $3.1 billion, which takes into account the significantly smaller investment universe in the early days of digital assets.

This week, the Cleo ecosystem, a protocol which supports mobile-first DeFi payments infrastructure, revealed that projects on its platform have secured over $77 million in funding. Company valuations were not revealed.

Among them, blockchain development platform Tatum secured the most significant amount — $41.5 million — and will be using the latest fundraise to integrate their tooling system with Web3 projects.

Interchain communication protocol Hyperlane also raised a significant amount of capital — $18.5 million from venture capital fund Variant to promote cross-chain communication and interoperable security. 

Regenerative finance project Loam, working to develop a data farming marketplace, raised $4 million. 

“I am immensely proud of our ecosystem projects in raising over $77 million across various venture rounds,” Rene Reinsberg, Celo co-founder and Celo Foundation President, said. “This demonstrates how bullish investor sentiment is in driving mainstream adoption of Web3 and real-world use cases for real people.” 

Other projects that received funding this week include Fun — a company building decentralized wallet and access control solutions on Odsy Network. 

Fun raised a total of $3.9 million in its pre-seed funding round led by Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen’s JAM Fund with an unknown valuation. 

Another pre-seed project which received venture capital interest this week was Web3 wallet Martian.

Martian, a wallet built on the Aptos blockchain, allows users to access decentralized applications on the network to buy, swap, swell tokens and collect NFTs. 

The company secured $3 million in a funding round led by Race Capital, with participation from FTX Ventures, Superscrypt, Jump Capital and Aptos. 

Other funding rounds this week include:

• Web3 powered newsletter Paragraph lands $1.7 million from Binance Labs.
• Singaporean based NFT wallet AWSt secures $1.7 million from early-stage venture fund and seed accelerator 500 Global.

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